


Dance with the Devil

by Nitrobot



Series: Metamorphosis [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime
Genre: F/M, Gladiators, Pre-War, Prostitution, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-25
Updated: 2016-08-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 10:26:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 39,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2021496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nitrobot/pseuds/Nitrobot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before the war Elita One was a denizen of Cybertron's Art caste, working in Praxus as an escort. Her first assignment had her in Kaon's infamous gladiator arenas, where a faceless mech stole her spark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is placed in the same universe as my fic 'Promise', and is intended to go along with the events in it. It's not necessary to read Promise before this, but it helps make some events in that fic clearer.  
> I've wanted to write some backstory for Elita One for a long while, since I feel it's the least she deserves, and on top of that Soundwave being a gladiator is something that I thought has a lot of potential. Some characters and ideas, namely Ratbat being a Senator during Cybertron's Golden Age, are taken from the IDW comics, and some things are of my own imagining (Ratbat being techno-organic and Starscream also having a place in the Council).

Unit Seven Zero One. Right there in those slat straight letters and hooked curves of numbers, Ariel saw her designation on the event list. She hadn't seen those numbers in a long time, only once when she was placed into her Academy set. But she'd heard them often enough; bellowed through vocalisers, whispered in strained audios and once she imagined that a medic drone would have recited it at her birth. And from that, she supposed it meant something. 'One' was a special number if you were a femme. What it signified was a curious little mystery that Cybertron's best bio-analysists still hadn't cracked; the phenomena of femmes rarely being born on their own. They were always with a brother or two, one spark split into several and one of them just so happening to be female. Something to do with CNA and base code duplication and mutation... Ariel never really paid much mind to the lessons during her time in the Academy. Not that there was any _point,_ after she received her 'worker' role. Her _function._

She didn't know a lot about what _exactly_ the whole 'Functionist' movement around Cybertron was, but she knew enough from her place within it to safely make the assumption that it sucked more than a cleaning drone's vacuum nozzles.  
But nowadays she didn't have much time to complain about it. Not when her processor was being picked apart, vocaliser endlessly tweaked and oiled, her circuits and wires flexed onto the verge of snapping from the torsion she forced on them every day. 

The joys of life in the Iacon art caste.

Ariel wasn't the only one who suffered, of course. They all did. Even now she saw a poor Mini-Con femme being carried off down a dim corridor with dimmer optics, legs twisted and vocaliser shaking the air with wails. If she survived the first night in what shackles they all called 'the med-bay' then the supervisors wouldn't let her live for long afterwards. A femme without legs wasn't much use other than as a frag-

"Elita! Get your aft in gear, you're gonna be late!"

Right, she kept forgetting. She wasn't Ariel any more. She was Elita One. And her shoulders were about to come out of their sockets if Chromia shook them any harder. 

"You know how pissed Beta gets when we miss our cues!" the blue femme said as she dragged Elita past sallow groups of other femmes gathered under flickering lights, half-heartedly flashing over their immaculate armour and holsters hidden beneath skirt plating. A mech marched past here and there as well, but they weren't in any better state. 

"Well _maybe_ if she didn't expect us to clean up in less than a breem, she wouldn't blow out her vocaliser every day," Elita muttered just loud enough to make Chromia smirk. "What's this mech's name again, anyway?"

"Primus, you'd forget your own if I wasn't yelling it in your face every day," Chromia huffed in irritation as they stopped before a wide set of doors, but her frown gave way to another smirk half-way through. "Starscream. _Senator_ Starscream. One of the big ones, I heard, in charge of Vos affairs-“

"Is that the Seeker city?"

"Frag if I know," she shrugged. "He's next in line to be something called 'Winglord', so I guess that translates into 'Seeker piece of slag'." Elita’s mouth and eyeridges furrowed into frowns.

"Come on, 'Mia, just because he has wings-"

"Means that he'll already think he's better than you 'cause you can't flap away from him." Her olfactories wrinkled and her servos crossed over her chest. "And anyway, he's a _Senator._ You know how tricky they are to deal with. They can get away with a hell lot more than other mechs can. So _now_ you gotta remember-" Again she seized Elita by the shoulders, and started reciting the honoured code of all courtesans. "When he takes your hand, keep your other on your blaster holster, don't piss him off, don't let him take you away from crowds or down 'shortcuts'-" She punctuated it with air quotes. "- and _never_ go back to his hab suite. Got it?"

"I've heard it enough times from Beta, I'm sure it's all but _engraved_ on my processor," Elita said with a scowl, rolling her shoulder joints back into place.

"I just want you to be careful, 'Lita," Chromia went on. "The first job's always the hardest. And that armour sure as hell ain’t hiding your shivers."

"I am _not_ shiver-" Elita stopped herself when the blue femme reached for a pink servo and brought it up, letting it shake and quiver in her grip. She looked at it as if it was rusting before her optics. 

"Just a... motor glitch," Elita muttered, pulling her incriminating servo away and rubbing at her wrist. Chromia made a skeptical noise, just as her friend remembered one crucial detail. 

“Wait a minute, Mia... if we’re going out of the city, what if he wants to see my... alt mode?” Chromia had the grace to let her faceplate soften with a small sympathetic smile.

“I wouldn’t worry ‘bout that, Elita. Mechs like him hardly bother with letting their _legs_ walk, let alone using their modes to get anywhere. You’ll be fine. But good luck anyway. And keep your audios sharp, I want a lot of gossip when you get back!”  
 _ **‘If** I get back, you mean...’_

Just then the doors slid open, and chaos erupted in femmes trying to get through and keeping their armour pristine at the same time. Elita felt a final farewell _thud_ on her back before she was carried out the doors by a tide of frantic femmes, her spark in her mouth and threatening to roll off her glossa if she opened it.


	2. Chapter 2

When Elita saw Vos for herself, it was hard to contain her awe. The gasp that came from her vocaliser was full to the brim with it. "Beautiful..."

"Yes, yes, I know I am, dearie," Starscream drawled as he inspected his claws, one set fanned out before him with the other tapping at a waist joint. Elita fought off the urge to roll her optics while he was so close- she didn't like how sharp those claws looked.

"But we can't spend _too_ long admiring the scenery, they'll be expecting me," Starscream sighed as he briefly brushed down his armour and held out a servo, waiting for Elita to twine her own around it. When they walked her heels clacked frantically on the ground as she tried to keep pace with him. 

"Now, don't you worry about all the other mechs there, sweetspark. You just need to stand near me and look pretty, and we'll both survive the evening."

_'As if it's going to be any easy being next to you.'_ Elita knew she had to guard her glossa and remember her Praxian Ps and Qs, but she took the liberty to scowl at the back of her escort's helm whenever he was looking elsewhere. He didn't seem to notice all the curious optics he was attracting as he strutted down Vos' Citadel plaza, wings casting an iron shadow on the steel streets. Elita wondered if they were more interested in him or his accessory. 

But even with her less-than-desirable company, the city's beauty stilled her ventilations until she felt her systems starting to overheat. Air peppered with the sharp taste of aerogon bursting through combustion chambers, the distant roar and nearer hum of jet-model engines shoving themselves through the artificial air. 

Vos was one of those strange cities with atmosphere generators at each end, pumping out lab-created clouds and draping a clean white sky overhead to give some semblance of boundaries to the Seekers. Elita remembered when Beta had been telling her about the different cities during her training- when Seekers broke past the atmosphere barrier, they were about to exit Cybertron’s gravitational pull and the safety it offered them. Making a re-descent onto the planet outside of the barrier was notoriously dangerous and caused the deaths of no small number of Seekers, so it was essential to have so that flying bots didn’t have to rely on guesswork to know if they’d gone too far up. 

Looking over at Starscream though, she doubted if he’d ever even used those wings in his life, other than for showing off. He’d had them deployed and spread when he met her outside of the Praxian Cyberos chambers, waiting beside two drone mechs who’d barely glanced at her when their lord bent to kiss her hand. Something like a shudder fizzled in her wires at the lingering feeling of his lipplates there, but her plastered smile seemed courteous enough for him. 

“Where are we going this fine evening, my lord?” He glanced over at Elita when she asked, and offered one of many contemptuous smiles that he thought looked charming. 

“My presence has been requested at a gladiator pit in Kaon.” He grimaced when he said the infamous city’s name, as if he could taste the fumes of energon processing even now, but he managed to flip his frown to accompany his vocaliser’s purr. “No doubt the other Senators will be relieved to see such a pretty face to distract them from the follies of _low_ caste mechs."  
Something happened to his faceplate then, like he had just bitten into a sour energon treat and was swallowing the hard shards.  
“I would be honoured to grace their presence as I am yours, Senator.” Considering she wasn’t honoured in the slightest, she was quite proud of herself for sneaking that slight past him. His amused huff cast a shadow over the smug giggles she was trying to suppress. 

“Seeing as you lack flight, we’ll take my private shuttle to Kaon.” As if on cue Elita saw the plush interior of it waiting for them just up ahead on top of the docking platform; soft, deep red to match Starscream’s helm crest and armour accents. The door was held open by another drone in white, who only nodded when Starscream climbed in first. Elita let out a small sigh of relief at Chromia’s prediction being correct, and prepared herself for more idle nattering with the Senator throughout the journey. But, for all he said she might have been nothing more than a dust speck on the window. 

She saw a few as she stared out of it, across the central layers of Cybertron as the low buildings of Vos fell away behind them to reveal the towering spires of Tyrest, blocking out the sunlight and momentarily shrouding the shuttle cabin in darkness every time it passed at the foot of one. Elita tried to guess which city came after Tyrest- Tarn? Nova Cronum?- but all she saw of it was tiny glimpses through slit windows in a dark passage that the shuttle flew through.

“You can never be too careful with transport when it comes to the lower cities, my dear,” Starscream replied to her unspoken question. “All sorts of bots will pelt your cabin with hard energon clusters and pipes, anything they can get their hands on. Crashing one is like a _game_ to them.” His olfactories scrunched up in derision. 

Elita lost track of time in the shadows of the cabin, but her joints were stiff by the time it finally slowed and docked at what she assumed was Kaon. The door opened, and her first taste of the city was bitter on her glossa as refinery smoke poured in. She tried not to cough as she took Starscream’s hand to pull herself out, grateful for a chance to stretch her legs. 

Below the platform was a dark wasteland, completely foreign to her. The metal-grille sidewalks looked as if they were caked in oil, but they didn’t shine. Lamps burned feebly at junctions and along dirt-encrusted streets, though most had their bulbs cracked and burst with sparking filaments. The buildings were tall and fat, streaked with blue and purple lights and topped with cruel-looking points. But what struck her most was the lifelessness of Kaon’s streets. There was no-one on the roads she could see or standing on the walkways, and her wary footsteps echoed loud through the emptiness.

“Where is everyone?”

“In the mines, most likely, or already at the gladiator arenas,” Starscream said, brushing gathering dirt particles off his legs. “Believe it or not, dear, but this is one of the _nicer_ districts of Kaon. Anywhere else and we would already have been held at gunpoint for our credits by now.”

Elita tried to share his shudder of horror, but she couldn’t help but think that even a mugger couldn’t have made her more uneasy than the barren streets themselves.


	3. Chapter 3

With Starscream leading, Elita made her way through the underbelly of Cybertron. They were barely more than three layers deep, but the sky was absent; shouldered out of sight by a tangle of highways and bleak starscrapers, foundations rotted away with rust. They might as well have been in the Underworld for all the weight she felt on her shoulders. 

She couldn’t see anyone else on the streets, aside from the usual abandoned drone crouched in the alleyways, but no doubt any residents of Kaon would be down in the mines or snatching recharge in the dark. It was only when they arrived at the arenas the city was so infamous for that she saw anything resembling life.

Outside the squat, bloated, unassuming buildings where life and death was so trivial, low and high caste alike clung to the walls like cysts. They were easy to differentiate; the low were all dirt-streaked miners awaiting their turn to die, while the nobles stayed are far as possible from them and kept a close optic on their subspaces. One of them, another Seeker in blue armour and shining white accents, glared impatiently at Starscream as he approached, marching up to him with wings twitching in irritation.  
“About time you showed up, brother.” Starscream flinched back at the Seeker’s accusatory tone. He quickly recovered with a shrug and smirk.

“I’m here, aren’t I, Thundercracker? If it was Skywarp, you would have been waiting another _hour_ only for him to scare the oil out of you by appearing right behind you.”

The mech apparently called Thundercracker only rolled his optics at that. “Whatever. Ratbat is expecting us inside.” He barely glanced at Elita as Starscream looped his servo through hers, and she was pulled into the stifling darkness of the gladiator arenas.

The bitter scent of charred metal, oil and unprocessed energon hit her olfactories like stale high-grade, and she had to choke back a cough as her sensors tried to stabilise themselves. Her optics adjusted to the gloom, revealing to her a wide corridor; floored with rusted tin and packed to the walls with waiting spectators. She suspected the gladiators would be in their own areas, preparing for the next event. 

Elita kept her helm down, focusing her audios on the voices of her escorts.

“I don’t see why _I_ have to be the social broker for all _your_ political bids, Starscream.” Thundercracker was still complaining, and she wouldn’t have blamed him if he had a mech like Starscream for a trine brother. “I haven’t even set ped inside the Iacon Council Chamber, yet I _still_ seem to know more about your job than you do.”

“Will you keep your voice down?!” Starscream hissed, tugging Elita closer to him. She saw Thundercracker flash a smirk of his own that confirmed the two mechs were related.

“What, scared that your date will know you have as much experience in politics as an Insecticon does? I doubt she’s even listening, you know what _Praxus_ femmes are like.” She made sure her optics were suitably dazed and distant to keep that illusion up, and was satisfied when Starscream gave an amused huff of a laugh. 

“Oh, don’t be so jealous that I can _afford_ one on a Senator’s salary. Anyway, this is no ordinary meeting, not even with an ordinary bot. I swear to Primus, Proteus must have been hungover on high-grade when he decided to let a fragging _techno-organic_ into the Senate...”

“You know it’s just to get the rest of them to shut up about being ‘respected’. Ratbat is hardly one of the infamous ones anyway. I doubt he’s even heard of High-Brid or anything else his kind dabbles in.”

“Hmph. As long as I can wash my servo after shaking his. You don’t think he’ll want to touch the femme, do you? I’d _loathe_ having to clean her as well...”

“Just don’t bring her back to the apartment, else Skywarp will be begging for a turn; washed or not.”  
She may not have known what a ‘techno-organic’ was, but at least that confirmed she’d be leaving long before anyone had a chance to take her anywhere. 

Starscream paused, bringing her shuffling to a jolting stop. She glanced forward again, seeing another mech greeting the Seekers with the most genuine smile Elita had seen all day, and the strangest armour she’d seen in her entire life. The metal was purple, but not painted or chromed, and there was a crest made from an alien furry substance around his neck. She’d seen it before on the berths of the most popular courtesan femmes and used for formal dress armour, but it seemed to be a literal _part_ of him rather than a decoration. The shining chevron on his chestplate marked him as a Senator, though Elita had never heard of one named ‘Ratbat’ before. 

To her surprise, he also greeted her with an outstretched servo, orange fur adorning the wrists as well. Her shock stalled her ingrained courtesy training, but when it eventually kicked in she knew to smile back and shake politely. His digits were tipped with talons that could easily have pierced her armour, but his grip was strangely gentle. Her digits flexed nervously when he let go, and she caught sight of a disgusted look on Starscream’s faceplate that he managed to wipe off just before his fellow Senator saw.

“You never mentioned bringing guests along, Starscream.” His voice was a low whine that rattled on the frequency range of her audios, but otherwise it was pleasant to listen to. 

Starscream waved a servo dismissively. “The femme is just a Praxian escort for additional company. No-one you need to bother with.”

Ratbat scoffed. “That attitude is the reason you have to turn to escorts for _any_ company.” Starscream only had a moment to look outraged before the Senator curtly turned away and walked onwards towards a circular opening in the grand hallway wall. He clenched his digits hard and pulled Elita along into low-ceiling darkness- she could feel it scraping lightly along her helm crest and blocking out all sight save for the biolights and optics of her escorts. She gulped in a breath of stale rusty air as they rounded a corner with light shining at the end. That was where the fighting pits themselves lay, and where she would be stuck for the next several breems surrounded by Seekers. 

Though on the outside the arenas were modest, the energon-soaked pits within were well known for dropping as far down as Cybertron’s very core. It made Elita wonder if any energon dripped down onto Primus down there, if he knew about his children being killed for sport so near above him.


	4. Chapter 4

Though it was still a breem before the battle was scheduled to begin, the arena was already full of mechs and femmes alike; tiers of seats and platforms towering into the copper sky above and circling the enormous pit that they paid to see energon shed within. Starscream and Ratbat did not have to concern themselves with tickets or waiting in lines, they had reserved seats at the very front of the rim. Thundercracker did not have Senator status, so he had to remain behind. Elita found herself going dizzy the longer she stared over the railing down into the gloom below, and had to sit back in her seat before she collapsed (though it _was_ tempting her, anything to get away from the Seeker). 

“So, which barbarians will be regaling us today?” Starscream asked, looking as if he was seated at a Tyrest Accord reading party rather than the front row for a bloodsport, optic lids struggling to stay up. 

“I hear Megatronus will be doing battle-“ Ratbat began, cut off by a scoff from the Seeker.

“Oh, _please_. I’ve heard enough about _him_ to last me a decacycle,” he bemoaned, furiously wiping stray flakes of rust from above off his pristine armour. “We’ll get five klicks of actual entertainment and then a pretentious speech that lasts twenty. If I want to be bored out of my processor, I’ll watch my paintjob dry.”

“Well, luckily for you we won’t be seeing him this evening,” Ratbat said with a mock sympathy. “The programme specified the first round would be Blackout vs Soundwave-”

“Never heard of them.”

“-and we can leave after one of them kills each other, or at least maims. As long as the low-castes see us making use of our privileged seating, we not need give any mind to their so-called pit heroes.” 

Elita tuned her audios out from their conversation, feeling her inner energon churning uncomfortably at their words. Instead she focused on the arena around her; seeing parties of bots clutching betting tickets in her servos. A youngspark tried to climb over one of the railings of the higher tiers, but his carrier managed to pull him away and keep him glued close to her  
chestplates. Looking down at the pit itself, keeping herself far from the edge, Elita saw a patchy floor with rust stains spilt like brown energon and pale puddles reflecting a hive of optics from above. Two giant circles were at either end of the pit, where the gladiators would emerge from to pounding cheers and cries for the only thing they had to give- their sparks.

Like most bots outside the Kaon states, Elita never seen a gladiator in the metal. All she had for reference was stories told by Chromia late at night or whispers between the protégé femmes about mighty mechs who fought for glory, or to impress a femme they were secretly courting. Those were the misunderstood ‘pit heroes’ that so many swooned over. She wasn’t so naive as to believe some gladiator would blow her a kiss from across the arena, but then again she wasn’t sure what to expect at all- a hulking behemoth with more armour than his weight can carry and weaponry sprouting from his shoulders?

“I presume this is your first gladiator viewing?” Elita jumped at the sudden sound of Ratbat’s voice, and she stalled again before giving a small nod. The Senator smiled again at her. 

“I can imagine many mechs would be honoured to have you on their servos, though hopefully at more pleasant events than this one.” She couldn’t help but return his smile at that, despite Chromia’s voice screaming in her processor – _‘Don’t get distracted, don’t get charmed, don’t let them see you falling for them!’_ But she certainly wasn’t going to find desirable company with Starscream, so she dutifully told the voice to stuff a sparkplug in it. 

“Why do you attend battles then, if they’re unpleasant?” Elita asked, keeping her voice low but with a certain quality of innocence in its tone. 

“Oh, it’s all about public image, being seen by the lower castes rather than remaining cooped inside some council tower. I’m sure you heard what I said to Starscream.” Her optics widened as she was about to protest ignorance, but Ratbat only kept his smile and lowered his helm to her audio. “It helps if you keep your optics away from who you’re eavesdropping on, dear. A tip for the future.” Her optics remained wide as he winked at her and pulled away again.

Techno-organics were a strange bunch, but Elita found that she didn’t mind that. 

“You said it was two mechs battling today. Do any femmes become gladiators?” She could tell they were mechs from their name prefixes-‘Out’ and ‘Wave’ were fairly popular ones, and she’d yet to meet a femme with either. 

“Oh, more than you’d think.” Ratbat seemed pleased with her questioning, from the twinkle in his optics. ”They have separate events from mech fighters, though, too much difference in frame mass to make for a fair battle. Although there was one femme by the name of Strika- Solus Prime had gifted her with a frame to rival that of heavy duty construction mechs.” Ratbat rearranged himself into a more comfortable position on his seat. “She destroyed the femme gladiator ranks and demanded to be allowed to battle mechs. ‘Other femmes are too soft for me’, she had said. So, those smart bots in charge of the arenas- mostly the trainers and bet collectors- said that if she won against a mech of their choosing, she could fight whoever she wished. Their champion was Lugnut, just about the same size as Strika. Just nanoklicks after the starting bell rang and they had shaken their servos, she’d torn his off and flung it to the other side of the pit. He passed out from energon loss while trying to reach for it.”

Elita didn’t know how enraptured she looked as he told the story. “So... Strika won?”

“Indeed. And when he regained consciousness, Lugnut asked her to be his bondmate while he was still waiting for his servo to be reattached,” Ratbat revealed with an expression of pure bemusement. “They’ve been living together in Kolkular ever since.”  
Across their seats Starscream hissed a _‘shush’_ as the open sky overhead began to disappear behind a large plate sliding over the ceiling. Darkness and silence rippled through the audience, and everything was suddenly very cold. Elita kept her shiver hidden and helm low as a lone figure walked to the centre of the pit. 

When plasma flames started to dimly burn in sconces around the arena walls, their light revealed the figure as a slight mech of orange and yellow armour. He said nothing to the crowd that weighed their gaze upon him, keeping his muted optics on a datapad in his hands. 

“One of the pit organisers,” Ratbat whispered to Elita. “I recognise this one as Kaon- not very imaginative with their names, but you can’t blame them when their charges keeping naming themselves after the same ancient deities all the time.”

As Elita considered the Senator’s words, the polar circle entrances lifted to allow the gladiators into the pit.


	5. Chapter 5

The sudden uproar of the audience almost made her jump from her seat, and she had to let her spark recover before allowing herself to look down. Both gladiators were mechs, as Ratbat said, and more menacing than anything she’d ever seen- even from a distance she felt the aura of hatred they exuded. 

One was of grey and black armour, which dripped of ill omens and thick paint fumes. Both colours were regarded as at best unpleasant and at worst repulsive. Grey was the colour of dead sparks and optics, bare steel and uncertainty. Black was a void of darkness, the chitin of Insecticons and other organic monstrosities. From the mech’s grinning mouth, sharpened denta flashed and gnashed together as he stepped forward on bizarre peds that elevated him from the ground. A row of blades draped down his back and scraped together as if they were excited.

Ratbat pointed him out as Blackout, having to raise his whisper to be heard over the crowd. “A nasty piece of business, that one is.”

His competitor was no less menacing. The armour was chiefly blue, with purple biolights running up his slim protoform waist. Elita thought it unusual he would leave it exposed, without even a layer of proto-protection, but she couldn’t help but think it made for a very appealing look. At least, she did until she saw his faceplate.  
Or, more accurately, his lack of one.

A sheer visor was all that could be seen of his face, crowned with a helm of sharp angles and points. He reflected her own optics when she looked at him, so she couldn’t let her gaze linger without feeling unease crawling its way up her backstrut. He must have been Soundwave. 

They both stopped before Kaon at the center of the pit, peds spaced and hands clenched into fists at their sides. Kaon looked down again at his datapad, before clipping it at his waist and nodding to each of the gladiators. At his motion they approached each other and stretched a servo out to shake their hands, as if this was nothing more than a friendly meeting. 

Kaon took a many few steps back, flattening himself against the wall. The two mechs kept their hands together, neither looking away until finally a bell rang hollow through the arena, and in an optic blink they had knife-points held at each other’s necks. In another Blackout had swept underneath Soundwave’s servo and pressed his ped into his back, kicking him forward with a terrifying force that made him sprawl on the ground. 

Elita thought if she blinked again Soundwave would have a puddle of energon beneath him and a sword sticking from his back, but as Blackout approached he swung a leg up to collide with his side and knock him off balance. A guttural roar sounded the black mech’s frustration, and he barely dodged a hard cut from Soundwave’s servo by rolling aside. 

In just those few klicks, Elita gathered that Blackout was at a severe disadvantage- he was much bulkier than his opponent, and his movements were slow and clumsy. He had raw strength, but it would more likely be his death than his savior. 

Soundwave, by comparison...

She didn’t need Ratbat to tell her his movements were beautiful. Every arch and sweep and spin on his peds looked effortless, vain and purely elegant. Every motion melted into each other like water, and was just as dangerous to metal. He was liquid, almost dancing around Blackout. Even the most skilled performer of Praxus would have been hard-pressed to match his majesty. Elita couldn’t track his individual movements, instead contenting herself with watching the blur of blue and purple armour. Energon was speckled on the dark plating, but there was far more trickling from Blackout’s pierced protoform. He was stumbling under his own weight, unable to react fast enough to Soundwave’s slices. Slender digits suddenly grabbed two of the long rotors on his back, pulling on them both and completely immobilising him. His servos flailed wildly as he tried to break from Soundwave's grip, as if he was a sparkling on a leash. 

The entire arena had gone silent, allowing Blackout’s pathetic wails to echo off every wall and helm. He screeched as the rotors tore from his back, flipped in Soundwave’s hands and then both plunged through his chassis, emerging from the other side in a cyan fountain. The steel blades gleamed with energon and reflected the fading light in Blackout’s optics; only when they had fully extinguished did Soundwave release him, watching emotionless as his rival pitched forward.

Then the arena exploded. 

Kaon marched out again in the midst of applause and cheers, ticking something on his datapad. The victor did not so much as glance upwards at his roaring appraisal, only moving to wipe the excess energon from his servos. It was impossible to tell if his optics were at all glancing up- or if he had optics. Even as he was marched out of the pit, leaving Blackout’s corpse to the rally of carrion crows gathered around, the applause still thundered on into the night. 

“Gladiators never cease to amaze me with how _resourceful_ they can be,” Ratbat commented in an amused way, barely paying mind to the body below him. Starscream only yawned. 

“And gladiators never cease to amaze _me_ with their _stupidity_.” He spat in the direction of Blackout. “Serves him right, carrying blades on his back like that. 

Ratbat shrugged. “I’m sure many a pit fighter could find a way to pry your wings off and bludgeon you to death with them.” Elita had to hide a laugh at Starscream’s appalled expression, though she was certain the other Senator heard it. 

“And you ask why I don’t _enjoy_ these carnal sports,” the Seeker growled, rising from his seat and shoving his way down the aisle. He paused only to tap Elita’s shoulder, motioning for her to follow him. Her legs were still shaking from seeing murder so close to her, and she almost tripped in her haste to exit the pit. The stench of oil under that of internal energon and burnt metal clawed at her olfactories; her throat burned and she felt as if she was going to purge as she stumbled into what little fresh air the dim entrance hall had to offer. Starscream was blind to her discomfort, tapping at the side of his helm and speaking into his comm unit, but Ratbat raised an eyeridge at her as he stepped out.

“I see the arenas are no source of joy to you either, dear,” he commented in sincere sympathy, pulling a small packet of something from his subspace. Elita looked at it as she bent over, ventilating heavily.

“What... is that?”

“Energel,” he explained, slicing the wrapper open with a claw and peeling it aside to reveal a sticky mass of pink cubes. “You’ve never tried it? It’s a common delicacy among the mid-level castes, and I’m rather fond of the taste. It should help settle your systems.” 

She wondered if any of his fur would be stuck to them, but she pushed that rude thought to the back of her processor. Hesitantly she took the wrapper in one hand and pushed herself upright, picking a cube up between two digits and popping it in her mouth. A sweet taste instantly spread over her glossa as the cube melted into a smooth gum. She chewed it curiously, savouring the syrupy texture before swallowing. A few klicks passed, and all ill feeling evaporated. Astonishment and relief showed on her faceplate, which made Ratbat pleased. 

“Feel free to keep the rest, I have more than enough for myself. And I’m sure chewing it will keep undesirable mechs away from your mouth,” he said quietly with a pointed look towards Starscream as the Seeker yelled into his unit. Elita saw no danger in letting her laughter free this time, though the gum in her denta hampered her jaw movements somewhat. 

“You know a lot about the gladiators; don’t you, Senator?” she asked when her glossa had wiped all candy traces from her mouth. Ratbat nodded with a hint of pride.

“Truth be told, I played a part in managing the arena before I became involved in the Senate. The rosters have changed since those days, of course, but I know enough about the majority of current gladiators to speak of them.”

Elita took a moment to think before offering her question. “The mech that won tonight... Soundwave. Why does he keep his faceplate hidden?” Ratbat only had a shrug to offer in reply.

“Gimmicks are a common thing among gladiators. It gives something for the audience to identify them by. Soundwave, however... “He glanced away, as if uncomfortable. “I remember he was a newcomer before I left the arenas, now he’s one of the most successful gladiators in all the ranks. Allegedly he was born into the pits, child of some other grand gladiator who styled himself after Liege Maximo. But past that, he is a mystery.” He glanced at Elita. “This mech has piqued some interest in you?”  
“Just... how he fought. It was lovely, despite... well, you know.” She didn’t want to have to grab for another Energel cube so soon after her first by mentioning it. Ratbat nodded in understanding.

“Yes, he has a rather rare style of fighting. I can’t quite remember the name, but if I recall correctly it is notoriously difficult to master. It relies on power focused to the peds and legs, and complete concentration.” He looked her over curiously. “Not unlike how Art caste femmes are taught to dance, am I correct?”

Elita’s optics widened more. “Y-yes, that’s... very similar.” Her interest in this Soundwave was growing with each passing klick; every new piece of information branching off in a desire to know more. 

Ratbat flashed one of those strange looks of his at her again. “Well, I believe I’ve taken up enough of your time this evening... oh, Primus forgive me, I never asked for your name.”

“Elita One.” It made her happy to say it, to hear it from her own glossa in her own audios. 

“I hope we might meet again in the future, Elita One,” Ratbat said with a low bow. “I’m sure Starscream will not be so anxious over bidding farewell to me, though I wish you luck in putting up with him for the rest of the evening.” He turned on his heel with a parting smirk, leaving Elita with a screaming Seeker and her thoughts boiling over in her brain module.


	6. Chapter 6

Elita didn’t realise she had been staring after the Senator until a set of Seeker claws landed on her shoulder, squeezing it uncomfortably. “About time he left,” Starscream growled through gritted denta, whirling her around with his servo draped over her. “Now we can finally get to the real entertainment of the evening.” His smile was slimier than all the Energel on Cybertron, and it was hard to hide the shiver that passed through her backstrut. 

“Actually, I...” Elita started to pat her hands around her waist, as if rummaging through her subspace. She made her optics wide in apparent shock. “I think I left something at my seat. Would you mind if I-”

Starscream was rolling his optics before she even asked, and sighed deeply as his smile dropped. “Fine, fine. Just be quick about it.”

She smiled up at him, as if gratefully, and unwound herself from his grip. Even back in the darkness of the second corridor she could feel the Senator’s optics burning on her back; relief only came when she turned the corner and saw the light of the arena again. She paused at the opening of the corridor, leaning against the wall. From what she could see there were less bots in the audience this time, and the pit had been cleared of Blackout’s corpse. His stench still lingered though, and she had to chew another cube to steady herself.

Elita just needed a moment away from Starscream or anyone else... and this was as much privacy as she could achieve for now. She’d have to return to him; she wasn’t so naive to think otherwise. And she knew exactly what he’d be expecting from her when they were alone.

Safe to say, she was nervous. 

Of course it was illegal for a bot to be hired for interface, as if it was a service, but the gladiator pits were ‘illegal’ as well. And even if the laws were enforced, there were always loopholes. Her whole job description was a giant loophole- it entailed that she spent evenings hanging on the servos of mechs who desired company. That was what they paid for; the interface was just an unmentioned extra. 

She’d never interfaced before, and the stories from other femmes of their first times did nothing to calm her. She needed reassurance... somewhere to think, something to distract her. Coolant was making her hands slippery as she wrung them together, and her optics burned in their sockets. She winced, blinking them rapidly to disperse the pain and clear away the sparks in her vision. 

As one of them faded though, it pointed her towards a darker part of the corridor wall. There was another branch to the passageway, leading to only Primus knew where.

She prayed that Primus was on her side as she darted down it, keeping her servos stiff by her sides and trying to look like she wasn’t about to be completely lost. The passage went straight on into a wide, dim chamber lined with iron doors and small sconces holding fires that pooled light on the walls. Elita would have admired the effect of their light more if not for the shadows that flickered on the walls as well ahead of her. Something told her this was no place for simple pit patrons, and going back the way she came would only send her right back to Starscream.

Relief filled her when the door she dived against was unlocked, but it was short lived. The room had a similar low light to the main chamber, but it only emphasised the light of the two red optics freezing her in place. 

They held her own in a vice, causing her to neglect recognising the blue of his armour and the visor left on the table behind him, insignificant compared to the sword sitting on its surface. Red was reflected in its dull glimmer, and cyan stains still soiled the steel. The face containing the optics was a sheer grey plate, seamless save for the scar that his scowl made. 

Elita’s vocaliser felt like rust as it tried to form words. “I-I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone was in here.

Soundwave didn’t move his glare. He didn’t move at all. Most bots would have taken that opportunity to leave and count Primus’ blessings on them, but Elita was rooted to the ground. And it was from more than simple fear... this was the mech who awed her during battle. He was such a mystery that even the arena masters knew so little about him... and now she was standing right before him. She couldn’t just leave yet. 

“I’m trying to avoid someone, you see. Well, a lot of bots... I saw you fighting, in the pit,” she admitted, rubbing her hands fiercely behind her back. “It was... it was beautiful. Like dancing.” She struggled greatly to keep her optics in line with his own; as they flicked around the room they noticed the slim digits on the handle of the sword that had spilt Blackout’s energon. 

All that came from her mouth were raw hums and dry coughs. She had nothing more to say, and her faceplate was burning like Darkmount’s lava pools. She managed a mutter of “excuse me” before turning back towards the door. Her hand froze on the handle as a baritone snarl whipped into her audios. 

"You call it dancing... I call it survival." 

When she turned back towards him, the red optics watched her like a wary predator. He still gripped the handle of his sword, but she tried to keep her gaze off of it. Her spark was hammering in ... excitement? Terror? She was in no place to give it a name.

"Where did you learn it, i-if you don't mind me asking?”

He let out a grunt that grated harsh against her audios, almost making her flinch away. "Survival is not _learned_ , harlot-"

"What did you just call me?!" Offence littered her tone, and she did little to hide it with her optics narrowed and hands tightening together. 

A slim eyeridge rose at her outburst, and Soundwave abandoned the grip on his sword to slowly approach her.

"Pardon me, I assumed you were an , _Praxian_ femme.” He spoke as if every word was acid on his glossa. “As it happens, I saw you as well. You sat with Senators while they practically stripped you with their optics.” He stated it as a fact.

“How dare you-!” Elita stopped herself before her voice went any louder, loath to attract any more trouble from outside. “I am no more a part of Praxus than _you_ are of Translucentica Heights.” Her remark only caused a glimmer of a smirk to spread on his lips, filled more with spite than humour.

“Your glossa is clever, I will give you that. Though I’m sure it is common practice for you to learn how to work your mouth properly-“

“I’ve half a processor to slap that smirk right off your faceplate.” She felt as if she only had half a vocaliser from how her threat wobbled. Soundwave didn’t make the effort to show his indifference to it physically.

“You wouldn’t, harlot. I could kill you without even moving my peds.” Elita couldn’t stop a cautious glance downwards and a nervous vent of air.

“You can’t kill me,” she stated. “Not even a gladiator can get away with murder outside of the official battles. “

“That law exists, but there is also one against femmes selling themselves into the berths of mechs rich enough to afford them.” He paused to glaze a look over her frame. “Obviously it is not enforced very effectively.”

“And why do you assume I’m some sort of pleasure femme?” Her hands went to her hips, lips pursed in a frown. Gladiator or not, she was not about to let a mech insult her honour so callously. 

“I can tell from your optics,” Soundwave revealed, taking a long step closer to her and staring down into them. Elita leaned back on her peds, but she was unable to completely pull away from him. “They always have blue ones.” His servo rose and a digit stroked near her cheek, not touching the metal, but regardless she could feel some sort of contact between them. Everything about her felt singed, set aflame and starting to burn inside of her. His voice only fanned the flames. “Bright enough to blind anyone who looks at them-"

In a klick his optics widened, his servo fell from her face, and he stepped backwards as if she was a hissing Scraplet. All discomfort in her body ceased, and she felt as if she’d been doused in freezing oil. She blinked rapidly, and he seemed... surprised. Shocked, even. His mouth was in a confused frown, and he kept glancing between Elita and his hand.

"Yours... your optics are different,” he said quietly, as if to no-one. “There is no sin or shame in them... you are still pure..."   
Long klicks past with Elita’s own confusion growing in each of them until he shook his helm and the grim scowl returned. 

"But still a harlot, nonetheless."

He whirled away from her and marched back to his desk, snatching a cloth and wiping down the blade of the sword.

“Turning left at the end of the main hallway will take you to the entrance,” he advised. “I suggest you do so quickly.” He didn’t look around to watch her leave, though he heard the thud of the door closing.


	7. Chapter 7

Elita’s spark was threatening to spill from her mouth with the weight of her frantic ventilations, and the stagnant cool air of the passageway did little to sate the numb tingling in her circuits. Soundwave may have moved beautifully, but his vocaliser was foul as a Wrecker’s. His words still stung and rattled in her audios, no matter how hard she tried to clear them out.

 _‘Harlot...’_ Femmes in her situation had many names, and most much more unpleasant than Soundwave’s own choice, but... something about his tone, his snarl that tore his words to pieces before they left his vocaliser, echoed loud in her processor and settled in her spark. It bloomed and pulsed like something cancerous, filled with grim truth. 

What if he was right?

“There you are!” Starscream’s screech pierced her thoughts and forced her attention away from Soundwave. Without even noticing she had been retracing her steps through the corridor and back into the hushed bustle of the main entrance. Starscream was marching towards her with enough force in his peds to rival that of a triple changer. “Where on Cybertron have you been?!”

Elita’s glossa clicked as it tried to form an excuse. “I... I got lost.” Her apologetic smile was as innocent as she could make it, and as she expected Starscream didn’t question her any further.

“Typical. Praxus bots would lose their helms if they weren’t riveted to their chestplates.” When his optics finished rolling his usual smirk spread again like spilt oil, plastered obscenely on his faceplate. “Well, if you have all you require, then we can go on to-“

Strangely enough, it was Thundercracker who saved her.

“Starscream.” The blue Seeker appeared between them, again ignoring Elita herself. “Your presence has been requested in Iacon. And by requested, I mean I will drag you down there by your wings if I have to.”

The Senator’s wings practically fluttered with his frustration. “Oh, for Primus’ sake...” He pressed a hand of claws into his forehead, groaning loudly. “My only political duty for the evening was accompanying Senator Ratbat. What is so important that it can’t wait until the morning?”

“Something tells me you’ll be interested in this, brother.” A small smirk was betraying Thundercracker’s otherwise stoic expression. “It involves our benevolent Senator Shockwave.”

Starscream’s hand fell from his faceplate, revealing a curious glint in his optics and a poisonous grin below them.  
“I see...” He turned to face Elita again, bowing with his wings curving down. “In that case, I’m afraid must bid you farewell now, my dear.” She tried not to cringe as his lips pressed against her hand. “I will have one of my shuttles take you back to Praxus, to ensure your safety. Let your superior know that her payment will be delivered to her before Shaula rises.”

“I shall, Senator. Thank you for... an enlightening evening.” It was the most honest thing she’d said all that evening.

 

**xx**

 

Elita barely set a ped inside Cyberos’ lodging section before Chromia ambushed her with questions (as well as literally ambushing her from behind a doorway).

“So, how’d it go?” She was still recovering from her near-spark attack while the blue femme’s optics glimmered mischievously. 

“You couldn’t have waited until I gave my report to Beta?” 

Chromia only shrugged in her half-sparked way, optics still alive. “You still haven’t answered me.”

“It was fine, okay?” She tried to move past her friend, but her efforts were vain as Chromia kept blocking her. 

“Your tone seriously suggests otherwise.”

A groan rattled past Elita’s vocaliser. “I’m... I’m just tired, Chromia.” Elita didn’t have to fake the strain in her voice- Starscream alone would have been enough to fry her circuits but Soundwave all but drained her. “All I want to do is get my debrief over with and go to my berth.”

Chromia’s optics lost their sparkle, concern wrought in the small wrinkles on her faceplate. “Was it really that bad?”

Elita’s second groan was full of regret as her shoulders slumped forwards and her helm turned down. “Starscream is the most pompous, egotistical aft of a mech I’ve ever met.”

“Told ‘ya.”

“I feel like I need an oil bath after being next to him so long. Even worse, he took me to Kaon, to one of the gladiator pits. It was some sort of political public image thing, with another Senator called Ratbat. It was... intense. I watched a mech _die_.” She couldn’t stop her vocaliser from cracking while a stream of Blackout’s energon erupted across her optics in a flash of memory.

“Sounds... pretty brutal.” Chromia’s optics and voice were strangely soft at her friend’s distress; Elita knew she would have barely flinched if she stood in a whole puddle of someone’s spilt energon. “You sure you’re alright, ‘Lita?”

“That wasn’t the worst part,” Elita said with a sigh, crossing her servos. “The gladiator that survived... Soundwave, he called himself. I ran into him afterwards... he knew I was from the Art caste. And he was angry. Really... really angry.  
“  
“Sounds like Star wasn’t the biggest aft of the evening after all.” Chromia’s lip curled in disdain. “What got his energon boiling so much?”

“Everything, anything, I don’t know. Mostly me. I did... kind of barge into his private room.”

Chromia’s expression fluctuated somewhere between confusion and deadpan. “I’m not one to judge, Elita, but that doesn’t sound like the best way to impress a mech.”

“It was an accident!” 

“An accident that almost made you into that guy’s target practice!”

“I know, I know.” Elita rolled her optics. “But ‘Mia, you should have seen him _fight_.” Awe bloomed suddenly in her voice like a newborn supernova, all embarrassment left far behind. “It was gorgeous, like... like watching the best of all of us fused into one mech.” Even that was inadequate to describe how she felt being witness to his performance. 

Chromia’s only note of emotion was the scepticism in her raised eyeridge. “I’ve heard gladiators called many things, but I’m sure ‘gorgeous’ isn’t one of them.”

_‘I can think of **one** you’d call that,’_ Elita couldn’t stop from thinking. Ever since returning from her first assignment Chromia rarely went a day without mentioning Ironhide, the bodyguard mech she met on her first assignment (accompanying the racer Blurr to a celebration at The Circle. The mech only had her for the evening, but Ironhide impressed her enough to keep her coming). From her words Ironhide was a former gladiator himself, handpicked and taken from the pits to protect his ward.  
She wondered if Soundwave had any association with him. If he had any friends he had to kill for hollow crowd cheers.  
Chromia interrupted that line of thought. “Anyway, haven’t you already got a mech to be admiring? That mech you told me about in training.” 

“Orion...” A tidal wave of emotions washed over her as his name left her glossa. Sadness and loss reigned chief among them, flooding her spark like lava. The mech she had spent the first years of her live with, who had treated her like a high caste noble and pressed his lips so softly against hers... 

Elita almost choked on the hard lump of nostalgia in her vocaliser. “Well, of course, but it’s not like I’m ever going to see him again soon.” She’d come to know that fact intimately from the moment their castes were assigned. “He’s in Iacon, pouring over dusty old datapads...” 

“And we’re all stuck here, pouring high-grade and polishing our armour every night,” Chromia finished for her. “Who knows, maybe Orion won’t even recognise you if you do meet him.” 

“That’s really not helping, ‘Mia.” 

“I never claimed to be helpful.” 

“Look, I really should go, Beta’ll be sending a drone out if I don’t get a move on.” Chromia was surprised enough at Elita’s abrupt change in tone that she neglected to stop her from slipping underneath her arm and hurrying along to her superior’s office. Her servos clutched tight around her chest to keep her spark from leaping free of its chamber. 


	8. Chapter 8

Elita’s berth chamber was colder than usual that night. Her ventilations were frosty clouds in the air, twirling upwards in the shaft of light from Luna-1 streaming through her window. Even with it closed she still shivered. 

Her exchange with Beta was almost as cold; a curt report that she barely seemed to be listening to as she tapped her pen on a datapad on her desk. Elita didn’t mention her meeting with Soundwave, or her exchange with Ratbat. When she was finished Beta nodded, still looking down at the pad, and reached down to rummage in a drawer. She pressed a few credit slips into Elita’s hand and said no more to her, leaving her to dismiss herself. 

The slips felt foreign in her grip as she stood in the vacant hallway just outside her room. Every apprentice femme was given a small allowance of credits every lunar cycle to spend as she wished (though most of it was spent on armour polish and replacing peds worn down to metal shavings), but that stopped once she began getting clients. Then she’d be earning the money herself (and even then the one in charge of her escort house still received a large percentage of her profits). 

Elita wondered how much her virginity would end up being worth just before shoving past the door and throwing them down on the table underneath the window, unable to look any longer at them. The light overhead _plinked_ off when she slapped the switch beside the door, drowning everything in sterile darkness. Every step she took towards her berth threatened to freeze her to the floor, but she managed to fall onto its yielding surface with a sigh. She curled into a ball in a desperate attempt to conserve body warmth. It must have worked, or the ordeal of the evening had completely drained her, as she was fast asleep klicks later. 

However, recharge gave her no sanctuary from her own processor. 

Her room faded and her mind went numb as shadow wings unfurled like an intricate ink stain across her field of dreaming. It was drying into a harsh blot that seemed to flinch against a soft red glow from somewhere unknown. Even with her primary consciousness disabled she recognised Starscream’s shape as it emerged through a ripple of obsidian, a sneer making his faceplate even uglier than usual. 

_“Survival... harlot...”_ His sneer didn’t move but his voice still echoed, rasping like sandpaper against a lillith corpse and destroying the illusion of silence. Purple flashed across his face and Ratbat’s replaced it, with something ugly twisting his expression into one of contempt. It didn’t suit him at all.

 _“Still a harlot.”_ The beast fangs that crested his faceplate almost snarled as he spat the ghostly words out. His cape was frozen in a demonic shape of wings that somehow managed to be worse than those of genuine Seekers. The insult echoed around her, layers upon layers of baritone hatred. But even with the deafening din Soundwave’s hiss was obvious beneath it all. And the red glow... so similar to that of his optics...

Cold coolant drenched her when she gasped awake, hands clenched in fists over her spark. The moonlight was gone now, everything in true darkness. Even her biolights were weak under the weight of the blackness. 

She stayed still, statuesque and shaking until Shaula’s rays through her window marked the new day ahead.

 

**xx**

 

“Well, you look like you just slept in a turbofox cage.”

Elita didn’t bother replying to Chromia’s quip as she sank into her seat, cradling her morning ration of energon (at least that was one thing she still got free of charge) close to her spark and hitting her heavy helm back against the common room wall.

“Bad dreams,” she sighed. “I had... pretty bad dreams.” 

“You wanna talk about them?” Chromia had already finished her ration, the cyan dregs collecting at the bottom of her tilted glass.

Elita looked down for a moment, and took a long gulp from her own glass. “I saw wings,” she began. “Silhouettes of wings, at least. It was dark, all black and shadows. Apart from red. This... piercing glow of red that I saw everywhere. I recognised it. It was his optics... Soundwave’s optics.”

“That was all?”

“No. He was talking.” A digit scratched at Elita’s cheek, optics wandering as she remembered. “The same things he told me yesterday. Starscream was there too. And Ratbat. They were all saying it...”

“Sounds like a memory leak.” Chromia shrugged as if it really _was_ that simple. “You should get Minerva to check it out-“

“I want to see him again, Mia.”

“What?!” Energon droplets splashed on the floor as she shot to her peds, empty glass forgotten in her grip. Flareup glanced at her over the top of her magazine, and more than a few curious optics pointed in her direction. “Is your processor glitching out, ‘Lita?” 

“From what I saw last night, maybe,” Elita muttered, crossing her servos over her chest. “But I know this is something I want to do. That I _need_ to.”

“Hun, what you _need_ is a day’s rest and some good old fashioned anti-Seeker propaganda. It’s very calming, trust me.”  
“You know I don’t like it when you call me ‘hun’.” Elita didn’t scowl often, but when she did it was sour enough to curdle industrial energon. What was left in her glass practically bubbled when her lips curved down into one.

“It’s just a habit, okay?” Chromia said her defence, throwing her servos up. “AndI don’t like it when my friends go out into near-certain danger.”

“Says the one who had her first date with Ironhide in a closed-down refinery factory?” Elita pointed out, recalling the scorch marks that took three solar cycles to buff out completely.

“I’ll have you know, almost all the incinerators had burned out by then. And the lava pools weren’t that deep anyway." Elita rolled her optics and slipped a hand into her subspace, digging for the treats Ratbat had gifted to her.

Chromia raised an eyeridge and tilted her helm when she pulled them out. “What’s that?”

“Energel. Senator Ratbat gave them to me.” She held the package out to let her take a cube, almost laughing at her grimace as it stuck like goo to her digits. Her expression softed as she popped it into her mouth, chewing slowly at first but then rolling her glossa everywhere to absorb as much flavour as possible.

“I like it. Any mech you should be seeing, it’s that Senator guy. I could do with more of these.”

“How about I _tell_ you I’m going to see him instead, and you tell me how to get to Kaon?”

The treat must have sweetened Chromia’s personality as well as her glossa, because she actually complied (or she just liked showing off her travel route knowledge). “Praxus Pod Central to Vos, then get another one to Kaon from there. And you would have gotten a shuttle pass with your first payment, so-“

“Wait, what?” Elita unfolded her servos and leaned forward on her seat, a baffled look overtaking her determination. 

“You know, the card that lets you get shuttles for free? So you can get back here if you get ditch- I shouldn’t have said anything, should I?” she thought out loud just as Elita raced out of the room back to her chamber.


	9. Chapter 9

Even bundled in the thickest armour and robes she could find, Elita felt naked in the public eye. 

She stayed low in her shuttle seat, only glancing up whenever the cabin shuddered to a halt at a station stop. When the orderly drone rumbled down the aisle it only took a nanoklick to scan her trembling travel pass, and her forbidden journey proceeded uninterrupted. Even so, she might as well have been packed into a rush hour shuttle for all the privacy she felt. 

She told herself that Kaon would be obvious when they reached its stop- it wasn’t as if it was a city you could easily forget- but the sign was only barely legible Neocybex, paint flaking away to charcoal smudges and the metal covered with scratches and what looked like bullet holes. By contrast the translation to Primal Vernacular beneath it was virtually untouched. Obviously Kaon’s residents weren’t partial to the new Senate restrictions on speaking anything but the new common tongue. Elita tried not to think about it as she walked underneath the scarred sign with her hood pulled up tighter over her helm. 

The streets all told the same grim monochrome tale, too early for any overhead lights to be glowing relief from the pervading gloom, and once again the scattered signs were of little help to her. She was petrified of straying too far from the shuttle station and becoming lost in Kaon’s labyrinth, but at the same time she was desperate for anything she might have passed by yesterday.   
But not so desperate that she rejoiced when she finally _did_ spy something familiar. Silver wings and a crimson crest emerging from a lavish private shuttle on a platform further down the station street, and an oily smirk that almost made her slip on the ground when she saw it. 

Starscream was not so avoidant of Kaon after all. 

Elita ducked low behind a stagnant cracked fountain as her processor whirred, trying to rewind her route from Starscream’s side to the gladiator arena. She could focus on avoiding the Seeker himself once her spark wasn’t in immediate danger of melting through its chamber. The street ahead of her was near-identical to every other one she passed, aside from the small details of graffiti and another few decimated walls here and there. Through the scattered rubble she could see a labyrinth of alleyways snaking through Kaon’s backstreets, and tried scanning nearby for an entrance to one of them. If she didn’t get lost in them, they could spare her from Starscream’s sight. 

There was one to her right, blocked partially by a stumbled pile of metal pylons; she’d have to shove them aside without drawing the Seeker’s attention, but it was a better option than waiting for him to go on his own way and risking him walking right towards her. She kept her airvents sealed closed and kept low as she started crawling toward the pylons, praying silently that the dust and ash covering the street blocks would stop her knee plates from making a noise as they scraped against them. She followed the curve of the fountain foundations, trying to gauge how far the gap between the edge of the oval, where she was protected from Starscream, and the alleyway was. She’d need to make a run for it regardless of the distance, and each klick spent out in the open would feel like a stellar cycle. Each progression forward was a tremor of her spark trying not to leap for safety out of her chamber and a fistful of black metal flakes in her hand; by the time she reached the running point her digits were stained charcoal and her knees ached viciously when she tried to rise up slightly. She’d need to wait until Starscream was looking away, carefully angling her faceplate up so to keep her helmpiece down low...

From what Elita saw, the Seeker was in the middle of an elaborate and dramatic argument with a drone attending his pod on the platform. She could even hear snippets of his screeching complaints on the barren wind, but she didn’t have any time to tune in closer- this was her chance. 

Her peds hit hard against the ground as she pelted for the alleyway, making her cringe with every leaping, desperate stride forward. She was expecting a cry of recognition to hit against her back any klick, for digits to grab onto her shoulders or something to trundle along and trip her up-

But... there was nothing. She might as well have been built a drone for all the attention she attracted in her dash. She still had to crouch low in the stirred dust, but she didn’t mind the motes swirling into her vents as she gulped down air to cool her burning systems. 

For all the Seekers liked to boast of seeing all of Cybertron from above, she had managed to slide right under ones’ olfactories with nothing more than timing and impromptu tenacity. Elita might have felt pride budding in her spark if it wasn’t already too filled with relief, thudding loud enough to flood her audios with its panicked rhythm. And when she tried to stand up she had to stifle a groan as pain shot through her joints; the whole time having to keep herself flat against the sliver of wall that was all she had to hide behind. The run may have only taken a few nanoklicks, but her dancer legs weren’t made for sprinting. She’d have to take the rest of the search slowly if she wanted to get home before starfall with some feeling left in her peds. 

Just as well the passage stretching in front of her was closed off from the rest of Starscream’s street, snaking into Kaon’s heart and growing darker the further it went into the distance. Elita had heard stories of Kaon’s inner districts, where the lowest caste dwelled out of sight and processor and fought the eternal battle for survival. Deeper still, in the city’s bare catacomb, hideous techno-organics and even worse were whispered to make their meagre livings selling what little they had to spare for what little they could gain. 

Even so, the risk of running into some horror of Unicron’s own spark was more appealing than going backwards. 

Apart from the lonely scuff of metal on metal and the whirr of her fans, Elita’s descent into the city’s bowels was mostly silent. Occasionally something would scuttle along the edge of the alley wall; a Scraplet nymph or some kind of Byter trying to stay in the safe grip of the shadows. Elita was more at home in the spotlight of Shaula, clutching her elbows and sweeping a spotlight gaze over every inch of darkness creeping in the sharp corners of the twisting narrow escape. Every corner slinked past and intersection she had to choose between she was braced for attack- from what, she had no idea, but “Better safe than sorry,” was a common mantra around Cyberos. 

At something around the tenth or eleventh corner there was another gap showing an empty street filled with the tempting safety of free daylight, but Elita resisted it and all the others that followed. She had no way of knowing what or who would be on the other side; admittedly not different from wandering the maze of Kaon’s innards, but at least a fight would be easier within walls rather than out in the deadly open with nowhere to run. 

There was one exception though; an immense fat block soaring upwards, blurry from the distance but still familiar to her. Even after just one visit, the gladiator arena was hard to forget. 

Elita emerged from the labyrinth with optics squinting against the rush of sunlight and in an attempt to see further, picking out the milling crowds of watchers and fighters alike. A thin trickle of bots marched towards it, almost beckoning her to join them.   
Her peds were shaking as they carried her forward, her spark beat an erratic call for help and her energon felt like it was frozen hard in her veins; but she was here, amidst the drifting dust and gore-soaked grime of Soundwave’s home again. 

Now there was only the issue of finding the mech again, and convincing him not to kill her on sight.


	10. Chapter 10

Elita forced her wrists to pull her hood down, allowing her to blend in with the crowd of commoners trudging inside. Political officials and their affiliates didn't have to worry about giving up their hoarded credits to attend matches, but any of the lower castes wishing to spend their off-breems splattered with energon had to pay for the privilege.

And of course, she'd left her paycheck from last night at her berthside. Scrap.

Under normal circumstances she might be able to pass herself off as a political escort, armour perfectly polished and decked in diamante, but she'd made an effort to look ordinary today. Her plating was plain rose and silver, a little better than what a common caste femme might be able to afford but still not extravagant enough to let her breeze through security with no questions asked. 

Her best chance would be to wait until a large group was admitted and try to hide herself in them without being noticed- just as well she choose to cover up, else her armour would have stuck out like a sprained servo amidst the sea of regal blues and greens, as well as the more common sludge and gunmetal paintjobs of the low-castes.

She had her optics on a mixture of Praxian-looking bots, not so drunk that they'd be denied entry but enough that they wouldn't notice an addition to their group, when she collided with a mass of purple armour and orange velvet. Elita had been trained to stay firm on her peds no matter what, but a rush of shock almost made her fall flat on her aft.

"We really must stop meeting like this, Elita, lest some bots get ideas." Ratbat smiled down at her, yet she struggled to find any kindness in his amused expression. 

"I...I didn't mean, I'm sorry-" 

"Oh, don't be, dear." The Senator waved a servo and put another gently on her shoulder. Now the kindness flooded his features, and Elita couldn't help but ease just a little in the glow of it. "Just some dry humour at your expense. A lot of my kind is cursed by it, unfortunately. If anything _I_ should be apologising."

"So, what brings you here again? I won't assume it's because of the lovely decor."

Despite the sparkle in his optics, Elita knew better than to let her guard down just yet. "I'm... meeting someone." It wasn't uncommon for escort femmes to meet their clients or friends at city landmarks if neither could afford their own private transport. "Inside the arena, but-"

"You forgot your credits," Ratbat finished for her, his smile turning sympathetic. "I can't tell you how many times I've shown up at a party not even able to buy a drink. For a few stellar cycles I had to weld my purse to my hip plating before I managed to get a subspace upgrade." Now Elita couldn't help but laugh at the mental image of the mech with a pack bulging with credits astride one of his hip joints.

"Not to worry, though," he went on, leading the femme to the steel-faced guard at the arena's entrance. "Everyone here knows me, and most know better than to not let me through."   
Elita raised an eyeridge at him. "'Most' know?"

"Those that don't do well to learn quickly."

Before she could ask him to elaborate further, an orange mech suddenly stepped into their path, towering and bristling before them. 

"So, the purple prince has climbed out of his aft and down from his golden throne?" He spat a wad of chewed energon just shy of Ratbat's peds. "What's the occasion- someone's wife wants you to kiss their sparkling's helm or did you just feel like flaunting everything you stole?"

"Nice to see you too, Cannonball," the Senator said cheerily, as if he didn't have a metal bull looking just about to charge him. "I didn't catch you last night."

The speed at which Cannonball dropped his fury was jarring, scowl replaced with gruff laughter. "Yeah, it was Lugnut's shift so I was with the Stars and the missus. Yellow paint's getting expensive and her chestplate pattern's starting to fade. She ain't happy."

"The Pit hath no fury like a femme without a can of 'Lemonburst'." The two shared a chuckle that left Elita more confused than ever.

"I know you didn't come down to look at my handsome mug, so what you here for?"

Ratbat shrugged. "I was feeling nostalgic for the old days, when this whole arena was in the palm of my servo and you were a little more careful with your glossa." He seemed to look fondly up at the bleak spires stabbing the sky for a moment. "Being a Senator pays better, though there is considerably more disgruntled employees who try to decapitate you in your own office."

Cannonball laughed again, a sound so deep that Elita feared she might fall into it. She hoped that thought wasn't what brought the mech's attention on her. "Who's the girl, then? Thought your lot wasn't allowed any femmes from Praxus?"

Elita had to stop herself from rolling her eyes, but her mouth went into a pout whether she willed it or not. _'How the Pit does everyone know I'm from there?!'_ It wasn't like the city had its own brand for everyone in its walls (other than a few mechs surfacing from night on the town with some unsavoury things blatantly carved into their armour by their peers).

"She's a friend of mine, meeting up with someone inside," Ratbat explained pointedly. Cannonball didn't look away at once, lingering almost suspiciously on her before stepping aside.  
"In that case, I won't keep you waiting."

Ratbat tugged on Elita's servo, and she was grateful else she might have been glued to the floor all evening. "Say hello to Flamewar for me, I might see a supply route gets disrupted near her safehouse."  
The mech released one last rumbling laugh. "You damn well better, you slippery slagger."

This time Elita didn't try taking in the brighter surroundings of the arena. She had to run to keep up with Ratbat's brisk stride, staring at him with wide optics. It took him a few klicks to notice, and he smiled mostly at himself. 

"Not all heavyweight bots do construction work," he explained. "A lot are used for guard jobs, usually hired by club managers or paranoid store owners. Cannonball's had enough past jobs to fill the Hall of Records, but he hasn't budged from here just yet. I hired him myself, you know." 

Elita had a lot more she wanted to know, but she decided to settle for the basics. An escort who knew everything about potential clients was usually a wealthy one. "And he's been here all this time?"

"I think he enjoys getting to throw out Seekers when they can't afford any bets they lose," Ratbat mused. "Something about watching them struggling on the ground."

' _Speaking of Seekers...'_ Something that had been bothering Elita since she saw the crimson armour just might be something the Senator would be interested in as well (after all, politics was dangerous if you didn't know what others were doing). 

"I saw Starscream... just on the city outskirts when I arrived," she revealed, with a trained casualness in her tone. 

"Is that so?" Ratbat scratched lightly at his chin. "I didn't hear of his sire giving him any Kaon-centered duties today." The fact of Starscream's father being the current Winglord was something only brought up in the depths of a drunken night out, considering when the Seeker was made a senator any accusations of family bias were swiftly squashed at their sources (they never did find the body of that Tyrest Times journalist...). 

"Well, I'm sure he has good enough reasons, else we'd be hearing him shrieking from here." Ratbat laughed lightly at his own joke, stopping before the arena's main entrance hall branched off into three separate lanes. At the centre stood an elaborate but decrepit and rusting iron statue, showing a minuscule gladiator facing off against an immense Driller leaping from the ground.

"Anyway, I've taken enough of your time," Ratbat said with an apologetic air. "Let's hope your friend doesn't keep you waiting."

Elita felt something in her spark stab every time she was reminded of her lie. "Where are you going?"

"Oh, I'll be around. Seeing what's changed and what hasn't." He gave a small wave and turned on his heel, making his way down the hall straight ahead. Elita waited a while after he'd disappeared from view before making her own way onwards.


	11. Chapter 11

Either a match was taking place or she was extraordinarily lucky, as Elita didn't run into any walking tanks or armories on legs as she threaded her way to the gladiator suites. Every hall looked the same with grease stains on the walls and bolted doors leading to the warrior dens- she'd need all the luck left over on the planet to magically find Soundwave's one. 

But Primus seemed to favour her today and sprinkle some extra good fortune on her path, leading her around a corner and almost straight into Soundwave's path. She only managed to stop herself colliding with him by spotting his peds first and angling her own legs back, forcing him to see her faceplate even as he glowered down at the obstruction (his visor was down, but Elita could almost feel his distaste burning through the glass). 

He made no move to pass by her yet, hopefully still stunned with shock like herself. She was the first to recover from it, smiling weakly. 

"Surprise."

Either the gladiator's vents were rusty, or the sound of her voice made him growl his displeasure. "I take back what I said past solar cycle. You are just as stupid as every other one of your kind."

Elita found herself scowling again. She'd probably end up with frown lines by the end of the day if she survived it. "You never said I _wasn't_ stupid."

"What do you want." It was clearly more of a demand than a question. 

"I want to speak with you." Elita tried not to think of how ridiculous she must have seemed- there were only two types of bots who sought the company of gladiators, those who wanted to frag them and those who wanted to fight them- but hopefully the absurdity of the situation would catch Soundwave off guard and work to her advantage. 

At least, that was what she hoped before he shoved past her. "Not interested."

She was panicking now, if he wouldn't speak to her then her whole journey would have been a waste. She turned desperately on her heel. "Wait, wait, hear me out! I have... a proposition for you."

Soundwave actually paused and turned slightly, his visor sliding upwards to show a flash of one of those half smirks that Insecticons gave before meals. "I'm sure you're used to offering yourself to mechs, but I've already had my whore of the week."

Elita squashed the urge to slap him- as if she'd do any damage to that thick midnight hide anyway. "It's not like that," she insisted, scurrying around the corner to keep up with him. "Just... give me a chance to explain, please."

Again Soundwave halted, digits twitching by his sides, deliberating over her words. His stunted winglets heaved upwards as he sighed, a colossal sound coming deep from his systems, and he turned to a door on his right side. Splaying his digits on the rusted metal, he pushed it open and stared Elita down. "You have five klicks. I suggest you try to make use of them." 

Elita tried not to remember how similar his warning sounded to his last words to her. 

There was a strange warmth to Soundwave's quarters that she hadn't noticed before, enveloping her in a comfort that contrasted with her company. Without glancing at her, Soundwave made his way to his polishing table and pulled his sword down from a mounting above it, snatching a thin edge of metal from a pile by his side. 

Trying to avoid looking at the sword's edge, Elita launched into her plea before he decided to berate her again. "I want to learn how... you move like that. Like how I saw yestercycle, I mean."

She didn't know what she expected his reaction to be, but he barely turned to acknowledge her. "You mean the 'dancing'?" he asked with a large dose of mockery. He shook metal shavings off his digits before going back to sharpening his sword.

Elita did the same to her own digits, only with coolant beading on them instead. "I don't just want to know how to dance. I... I want to know how to fight."

That managed to hook his attention, his servos pausing. He didn't turn, but she could hear a smirk in his voice when he spoke.

"And what might a harlot do with a sword, other than tear her mech's armour off more easily?"

The coolant on her frame evaporated as anger flushed through her. "Stop calling me that! I'm not..." To say she wasn't _supposed_ to be one was an outright lie, yet the truth refused to come to her glossa. 

Instead she let her indignation fuel her vocaliser. "There is nothing wrong with what I am or what I do. And what I am is not some pleasure bot to be thrown away when I'm broken!" Elita was about to snap her digit joints from how hard she clenched them, and Soundwave had resumed his work as if he wasn't even listening to her. She wouldn't let that stop her.

"You said yourself I'm... not like other femmes. You saw it in my optics, so don't pretend that I'm beneath you all of a sudden." Her breath came shaking through her air vents as her fans tried to cool her down. 

"I think I know now... what you meant by survival-" Elita's words abruptly end with a shocked yelp as Soundwave suddenly grabbed his sword's hilt and swung it around, bringing its point to her neck cables with anger burning in his optics.

"You know nothing of that word." His usually monotone voice dripped with scorn and disgust as he slowly pulled his weapon away, letting Elita heft out trapped air cycles and rub at the shallow cuts on her neck wires. 

"How many of your fellow whores have you had to kill for your energon?" He didn't bother waiting for an answer. "None. You flash your chestplates at any mech and have them sucking the stuff off your protoform five klicks later. The same mechs you spread your legs for are the very same who cheer for our deaths." His words were bitter growls, his frame taught and his optics ablaze with fury that threatened to blind Elita if she stared. She cowered back at his next smoldering snarl.

"Now ask yourself again... ' _What is survival_?'"

He was answered by the sharp, hollow ring of a bell tolling throughout the arena. Elita knew it was the summons of death.

Soundwave glanced behind her at the door with something else momentarily replacing his anger. If Elita was as foolish as he thought her, she might have said it was fear. His glare was less powerful now, but it still burned right through her. "Prove you know what it is by leaving before I return." He shoved past her again, and this time she didn't give resistance. She might have missed his last mutter if she wasn't petrified; " _If_ I return."

Perhaps she didn't just imagine that flicker of fear after all.


	12. Chapter 12

It took a few klicks for the toll of the bell to fade away completely, and by then Elita had decided she wasn't going anywhere. Against all common sense and survival instinct she would wait for his return. She wasn't scared of him. She wasn't scared of his bottomless threats or his mask. She... _was_ slightly scared of his sword, but she figured she was allowed to be. 

So she fought her instincts to snoop, dragged a chair in front of the door, seated herself and waited. About half a breem into her stubborn vigil she was wishing she'd subspaced a datapad before leaving Praxus when a scratching at the door caught her attention. It stood out against the regular ambiance of the arena, the muted thumps of the audience somewhere far away and the creak of the war machine's oiled cogs trundling along. It was deliberate; someone who wasn't Soundwave was trying to get in.

A black muzzle forced itself around the edge of the door, filed denta glinting and red optics, so similar to Soundwave's, sweeping over the room. They eventually settled on Elita as she sat frozen in her chair, digits digging into the underside of the seat as she tried to stop from bolting. She didn't know what to call it, but it was anger and suspicion on four legs and almost half her size. Obsidian lipplates pulled back in a hiss as the rest of the serpentine body slinked inside, prowling along the walls and lashing something above itself. 

In her shabby robe and sheer armour, Elita felt more than defenseless. She was scared to break optic-contact with the snarling beast- a guard creature, perhaps?- but at the same time she wanted to eye the door and make a dash for it before the skulking nightmare pounced on her. 

If it had claws it wasn't showing them just yet, but Elita felt her protoform prickling just looking at its razor-point denta. Her legs shot up off the floor up to her chest for what little safety her pathetic perch offered, and the beast only growled more. It took one step forward, as if testing the air, then another as slow as a lagging signal. 

Elita didn't want to think of what would have happened if it reached her before Soundwave did. 

"Stand down, Ravage." If he was surprised at Elita's persistence in annoying him, his visor and weary stance in the doorway hid it well. The creature froze just as she did, flicking its head back to Soundwave and silencing its snarls. The look it threw at Elita was more of distaste than open hostility now as it sloped off towards the gladiator's peds, following him to his worktop. The tail that was previously tearing the air asunder was now coiled gently around one of Soundwave's dent-strewn legs, and the menacing muzzle lay sleepily on the table as a hand stroked along its helm.

Soundwave noticed Elita's confusion like he noticed everything else- with nothing less than pure condescension. "You've never seen a cirkitten before," he stated, his tone refusing to reveal any emotion to her. 

Elita wished he would at least pretend to not know everything for at least one klick, but she shook her helm to confirm it anyway.

Soundwave turned away from her, still petting his companion while his other servo hefted his sword onto the table. Even with him not looking, Elita knew better than to stare too long at the fresh mosaic of scars, fissures, and other injuries that adorned his armour.

"You should know this one isn't even to his full size, and that their claws can cut through anything short of industrial grade steel." He swiped another edge of buffing metal over his sword, not bothering to clean the energon off, before throwing it over his shoulder. The edge caught flight and light for barely a nanoklick before it was sheared into five shavings that floated to the ground, the rest of the bloodied remains caught in Ravage's claws. He flexed each talon and licked at the energon stains. Elita understood what she just saw was a practiced demonstration, and her protoform started tingling again. 

"I don't like others stealing my kills, so I'm still debating over whether I should let him kill you for me and save myself the work," Soundwave let her know, with the first teasing tendrils of fury creeping into his growl. 

Like before, all Elita could do in her defense was call his bluff with crossed servos and stern optics- or as stern as she dared, at least. "You wouldn't have stopped him if you were actually planning that," she pointed out.

She couldn't tell if he was actually amused or not from the mask, but she swore there was a smile on the edge of his voice. "Why are you still here, harlot?"

"Because you still haven't said whether or not you'll..." Unsure of what word to use, she coughed just low enough to not attract Ravage's attention. "...whether or not you'll train me."

Now there was a definite sarcastic humour in Soundwave's tone. "And here I thought the answer would be obvious even to you. I have better things to do with my time than sparklingsit." He moved away from his table and, abruptly, started flicking his chest armour clasps open. Elita's retort dried on her glossa from the heat of embarrassment and shock. For all his talk against escort femmes, it seemed gladiators didn't have much sense of modesty either. She tried not to ogle as he shrugged the layers off, letting the armour fall to the ground. His protoform made his plating look fresh out of the metalsmiths forge; the deep blue skin was cracked across its huge surface with half-healed and newly opened gashes, burns and imprints of broken wires etched into every crevice. It was like looking into a shattered mirror and seeing a wounded monster on the other side. 

Even with his back turned, Soundwave must have known she was transfixed. "Not everyone can wear scars like a set of evening armour, harlot."

Elita wasn't sure if it was meant as a compliment or not, but she blushed regardless and only barely managed to hide it when he turned to face her. The front was much the same as his back, with some smaller cuts still bleeding energon down to his legs. He had to push Ravage away to stop him licking the open wounds, seating himself on the other side of the room with another, smaller shelf-like desk at his side. He armed himself with a hand-welder, waiting for it to heat up as he wiped the only clean thing in the room over the back injuries he could reach. He'd made himself a makeshift medbay. Elita had heard there was an official one near the rear of the arena to tend to injured gladiators, but more often than not patients didn't survive and any who did were too weak to fight any more, instead being carted off to the Institute to be experimented on (a horror story told to Art proteges to stop them running off to Kaon, but Elita wouldn't have been surprised if there was some truth in it). 

The welder glowed as it reached its working temperature, and Soundwave struggled to hold the largest wound on his shoulder closed between his energon-sticky digits. She didn't have much medic experience but, as usual, Elita couldn't keep herself out of it.

"Would you like some help with that?"

"I don't need your assistance," Soundwave grunted after a curse at his digits for refusing to stay still. Self-healing was hard enough with only basic materials available, but doing it alone and on something you could barely see was near impossible. There was only so much repair nanites could do, and they couldn't do anything for a rust-infected wound. It was a miracle his other injuries hadn't festered if they weren't being seen to properly.

Elita decided to take some inspiration from Soundwave and give herself some makeshift courage. "I didn't ask if you needed it, I asked if you _wanted_ it."

Soundwave pinched the gash closed, idling with the welder. Either her own bluff had worked, or he was secretly desperate. He summoned her over with a jerk of his helm, handing the welder to her. With one servo free he used it to slide his visor off, setting it down on an empty space on the shelf. She suspected he removed it just so she could see the smugness in the smirk that lay just under the surface of his faceplate. "You would have experience with naked mechs anyway, harlot."

Elita flicked the welder on and managed to not flinch from the heat that roared along her servo, buffeting her faceplate and adding force to her scowl. "It's not wise to insult the one patching you up."

Soundwave repositioned himself so he was seated backwards in the chair, with his back facing her. “Tell me your designation, then I won't have to call you that."

She raised an eyeridge, both at the strange familiarity he was showing and the realisation that she'd gone this whole time without him even knowing her name. “Elita. Elita One. I... I was named for being a singular sparkling.” 

She didn't know why that was important, but it got a huff of air in reply as Soundwave refused to meet her gaze. She was almost grateful for it, not having to feel his glare on her as she closed up the first wound. There was a hissing intake of air when the flame touched the separated metal, but other than that he kept quiet. 

Elita only decided to break the shaky peace between them when he'd stopped bleeding, reminded of something that had been niggling her processor since her first time with him. “The other cycle... you moved away from me, when you looked into my optics. Why? What did you see there?”

She was prepared for either sarcasm or silence, but was pleasantly surprised by a genuine answer. “I am a telepath, of sorts.”

Another thing she'd heard of in youngling stories, but she wasn't about to expose any more ignorance for him to mock her for. Not when he was actually co-operating for once. “How does that work?”

Soundwave groaned and scratched lightly at the weld-ridges holding the metal patch over his first wound in place. “Looking at a bot gives me a brief profile of their strengths, and their weaknesses," he explained as she wiped over the shallower cuts. "Seeing the depth of their optics, analysing what screens past them on the way to the processor, allows me a glance of what it contains. Thoughts and memories." His helm turned just an inch, just enough for him to acknowledge her properly. "Within you I saw endless hours in training sessions and ballrooms of high ceilings and needless grandeur." There was an absence of judgement in his verdict. "You are only guilty of being insufferably educated and wasting your life, but not of showing your valve to every mech who passes you credits. Not yet, at least.”

And just like that, the sneer Elita didn't have time to miss was back. Soundwave stood up in the middle of a sweep over his lower back, stepping around her deftly and snatching his armour up from the floor faster than his servos should have allowed. Ravage lay curled at the foot of the sword table, only opening an optic to make sure his master was in order and barely noticing Elita. 

"I wasn't expecting... such gentle digits," he revealed as he clipped his armour back on with an easy efficiency; afterwards standing for a long few moments in his thoughts, looking at his peds and clenching his bloodied claws. 

"I will endure you for one... lesson." Soundwave spoke as if the word burned his glossa. "If I believe you are capable of learning, then I will mentor you further." His helm snapped up, trapping her in accusing headlights. "But _only_ if I know I won't be wasting my time. I make no promises, harlot."

Elita was so thrilled she didn't even mind the insult. She hid her elation under a single nod. "One chance. That's all I need, I promise."


	13. Chapter 13

With her helm dazed from her day of near death experiences, Elita had no idea how she threaded her way back to the shuttle station, floating past the weary ghosts of dead-optic miners and refinery workers. Every now and then a construction bot would plod along, tiny tremors following behind the reek of burnt steel and vorns-old oil stains. It was the stench of the whole city awakening, the scum of Cybertron settling on top of the night like a thin layer of grease. She hadn't noticed it in the arenas or yesterday, buried beneath the tangy smell of unprocessed energon and the relief of returning home alone, but even the shuttle doors failed to block it out as she took her seat again and waited for the rest of the planet to rattle by her window.

Elita's return to Praxus and the Cyberos venue was hardly remarked upon; the only one who paid her heed was the guard outside the door to the dancer rooms, giving her a glance over and checking his datapad before allowing her through. 

Chromia noticed her walking into the lounge as if she'd just stepped out to stretch her legs for a few klicks. "How'd it go?"

Elita stopped short, running over the events of the day silently and, despite herself, smiling at having survived. "Better than I expected," she answered vaguely, throwing herself down on an empty seat. The journey to and from Kaon wasn't nearly as exhausting as some of her training sessions, but it was just her peds that needed a long rest. 

Chromia quirked an eyeridge, momentarily pausing the buffer on her digits. She was the type of femme who was only interested in gossip if it involved someone getting their aft kicked, and as Elita hoped she didn't press further for specifics. "Well, while you were off in fairytale land with your new boyfriend, you got a delivery," she informed off-handedly.

Elita barely heard the news over the buzz of the buffer and her own weariness, but her optics snapped open when it finally got through her processor. "A what?"

"Yeah, someone left a box with Beta. Some kind of weird mech with orange fur." Even as Chromia shrugged as if those came every other orn or so, Elita was back on her peds and pushing down the ache still laced between her wires. 

In her office, Beta was already attending to an upset dancer as thin as Elita's servo, but she was quickly waved aside upon Elita's arrival. 

"Ah, the prodigal daughter returns," Beta quipped with a deadpan smirk, reclining back in her chair with peds on her desk. "We all thought you'd taken a shine to Kaon and decided to run off on us with a handsome gladiator." 

Elita mirrored her smirk with little success. "If only. Chromia said there's a package for me?"

Beta flipped her peds back down and gracefully dipped under her desk, retrieving a small wrapped rectangle with a dainty bow on top. She handed it over with a raised eyeridge. "Isn't your sparkday _next_ vorn?"

"Since you remember it, I'll be expecting a day off on it!" Elita called back as she left Beta's office, heading straight to her quarters with slightly too fast peds. She found a note on the underside, but only opened it once her door was firmly closed.

Her sparkrate rocketed as she unfolded the film- and skipped several beats when she read the unfamiliar, carefully curled words on it.

It wasn't Orion's writing. 

_'Thought you might like some more, with a little something to brighten up your room. I noticed the colour matches your armour,  
Sincerely, Ratbat~'_

Her digits started pulling the wrapping apart subconsciously, almost dissecting it. There was a translucent packet of more Energel cubes neatly stacked on top of each other, and beside it a silver stalk adorned with rosy crystal petals. She knew it was the kind of thing Orion would send her, if he could afford it, but knowing it was from Ratbat... knowing _he_ knew where she was...

Of course it wasn't going to be from Orion. She should have known that when Chromia mentioned 'orange fur', but even so... she'd fooled herself into hoping. They'd separated since their Academy days, but he'd sent her packages of energon and trinkets when she was still training. Now that she'd become a full-fledged escort, his presence had all but disappeared from everywhere except her spark. He obviously didn't know where she was now, but it still hurt to have nothing from him. Not even a note with his adorably messy scrawl on it.

Elita twirled the crystal flower in her digits, placing it over her aching spark and tapping the shimmering petals. At least Ratbat was right about the colour.

 

**xx**

 

Her training started that morning, with her finally remembering to bring her credits along. The shuttle ride was strangely familiar now, if not yet comforting, and she easily retraced her steps to the arena. The crowds had thinned out significantly today, and the same orange guard from yesterday was barricading the entrance. She was already certain he'd recognise her, but she wasn't expecting him to greet her with such an appraising look. 

"Elita One?" he asked before she could get her credits out. Her servo hovered over her subspace, optics wide as they looked at Cannonball, trying not to focus on his facial scars. 

"Y-Yeah, how did you know...?"

"Soundwave said you'd be coming. Told me to let you in," he explained with a gap-denta grin that leaned to one side, his whole expression ramshackle. When he tilted his helm his whole faceplate looked like it would roll off. "Friends with senators _and_ gladiators, huh?"

There wasn't much suspicion in his voice, just innocent curiosity. Elita shrugged with a sideways glance. "More like 'inconvenient acquaintances'."

Cannonball's laughter sent his whole frame trembling. "Ha! I like that. You're alright for a Praxian, 'Lita." He stepped aside to admit her, not seeing the scowl pulling her lips down at the nickname or yet another reminder of not-so-sweet home while he gazed off somewhere distant, still talking to himself. "Like a sober version of my sparkmate... wait, don't tell her I said that!"

Elita soon lost herself again in the maze of the arena, but Soundwave's quarters dragged her in again like a moth to a flame. Remembering manners for the first time, she knocked, only entering when there was no answer. 

As the door closed behind her, a sword sliced into it just an inch from her helm.

"A sparkling could have parried that," Soundwave grunted, lurching his blade out and glaring into her wide optics. Elita only managed to peel herself off the door when her spark had stopped trying to leap out her throat, stepping into the small room with shaky steps and frantic looks for other traps lurking in the shadows. Ravage, at least, was nowhere to be seen. 

"You and me have _very_ different definitions of 'training'," she said, vocaliser still oscillating from shock. Soundwave flipped his sword with the casualness of a butcher, giving her another one of his sideways glares.

"Your 'once chance' is fading quickly."

Elita challenged him with a scowl, cracking her digits together by her sides. "We don't all have the reaction time of a rabid turbofox, you know," she scoffed, eyeing up the array of unseen swords and short knives strewn out over his worktop.

Soundwave caught her staring, and stepped in front of her view. "Let me make one thing clear, Elita. For each technique I teach, you will have three chances to demonstrate it. If you fail four times, you get out and never bother me again."

Despite the hidden, almost hopeful snarl in his tone, Elita smiled. "You actually used my name that time."

His eyeridges bunched together, optics underneath showing neither anger or amusement. He reached behind and tossed over a dulled sword, more rusted rod than blade that had the weight of an engine block in her hands. 

"Your first lesson; not killing yourself with your own weapon." He allowed her a maximum of five nanoklicks to get used to the sword before striking out, cutting a dent into the metal when she brought it up to block the brutal slice. Her servos rang through with the impact, pain starting to bloom in her joints just from holding her sword up. When Soundwave made his next cut lower, she gratefully let her weapon drop down to catch it. The dance continued haphazardly like that, the two bots barely in tune with each other as the clang of metal against metal made up their melody. Elita stumbled and Soundwave soared, expert piling hard against novice. One particularly savage thrust forwards forced her to face backwards as her spinal column twisted to stop Soundwave stabbing through it. 

What felt like breems later, Soundwave finally shouldered his notch-knackered blade and stepped backwards, barely venting while she doubled over gasping for air. "Congratulations. You have the survival instinct of a lemming," he praised. 

Elita grimaced at the sarcasm, but replaced it with a tired smile when she finally summoned strength to lift her helm up. "Do I get a reward for effort?"

She liked to think he would have smirked at that, a single flash of denta that might have hinted at something other than anger and sourness brewing in his spark, if not for the bell ringing out distantly. Soundwave looked up, as if he could see the alarm through the arena's thick tunnels, darkness literally falling on his faceplate as his visor descended.

"My audience awaits," his hidden mouth said. He replaced his blade with a gleaming new one, securing it to a shackle on one of his servos that left his digits free to move. "I trust I don't have to tell you to remain here," he said as he walked past Elita, unarmed servo reaching for the door.

"Why can't I watch you?" she asked, forcing herself to stay upright despite the exhaustion bleeding through her depleted fuel lines.

Soundwave glanced at her over his shoulder. "Once was not enough?"

Elita suppressed a shrug, thinking of what else to say that wouldn't make her sound like a creepy fan (Primus knows how many of those gladiators must have had). "It'd help if I could see more of how you fight other bots," she offered, almost believing it herself. Mostly it would be nice seeing someone other than herself at Soundwave's mercy.

The gladiator watched her mutely for a few more nanoklicks, before absently pushing his door open. "As long as you stay in your seat and don't distract me."


	14. Chapter 14

Trailing after Soundwave, through the cavernous corridors threading a rusted labyrinth through the arena, Elita wasn't sure what to expect this time around. All she knew was that someone was certain to die, and there was still a chance that it might be her. 

"You'll sit at the rear of the audience," he informed her, keeping himself ahead with firm wide strides and leaving her to catch up. "And you will stay there until I've won."

Elita knew better than to ask what would happen if he didn't win- it was a very unlikely if- but she still wanted to know more of... well, she hadn't managed to decide on what before an unfamiliar voice from further down tore him away from her.

"There you are, Soundwave!" Being so deep under the surface, Elita might have mistaken the mech speaking for an Insecticon with his shiny black chitin-plates and the antennae springing out in a twitching pair from his helm. Even his voice had a click to it, as if his sharp denta drove dents into every word that floated past them. Hexoid optics glimmered curiously at her when he noticed her almost hiding behind Soundwave's frame. 

"Busy entertaining?" the insect asked, propping his smirk open with a fang. Soundwave didn't acknowledge the quip, not even with a tightening of cords or creak of his cooling fans. The mech must have been used to his silent treatment, from how the translucent panels on his shoulders twitched in a shrug.

"Better hurry up," he told Soundwave, flicking a helm-stalk along with a digit pointing behind him. "Megatronus' already got his armour on."

Soundwave resumed his walk forwards, but before Elita could follow him the insect mech's servo made a barricade between them. 

"As for you, sweetspark, you'll be up top for a nice view of him." He used his other servo to point left, revealing a set of stairs set into the wall and climbing upwards into pure gloom. Though choosing between the darkness-drenched steps and the Insecticon waggling his feelers at her wasn't hard, Elita still kept her ascent slow; feeling for any changes in the ground and guiding herself with hands against the curving wall. By the time she emerged into the sudden glare of light and the deafening thunder of the crowd, the match was already under way. 

She settled herself quickly, squinting down in the harsh light at the sunken oval of the arena. With the day still young the plasma sconces were empty, replaced by the natural sunlight that almost blinded her as it streamed in from the wide open sky above her.

Even from a distance Soundwave was unmistakable; in the daylight his dark plating glowed a more welcoming navy interwoven with his violet biolights, and his blade glinted a promise of pain to the mech opposite him. She couldn't recognise this one but she assumed he must be Megatronus; scarred grey armour pitted with more than just sword marks, optics beaming a faint cyan up at the audience as he welcomed their applause with open servos- literally, his arms were spread open as if to embrace the heavens. 

He might well be a permanent resident of them by the end of this. Elita tried to push that grim piece of foreshadowing aside as she focused on Soundwave.

He walked forward to greet Megatronus, but there was a hesitation to stretch his servo out to him and a shudder up along the limb as the other gladiator clamped his claws around Soundwave's digits. Elita recognised the reaction; it was the same one she gave to Starscream when she first met him. For whatever reason, Megatronus repulsed Soundwave, and he snatched his hand back as soon as it was released.

The same insectoid mech they'd ran into seemed to be the organiser today, nodding as the two mechs distanced again and stepping back just as the starting bell tolled. 

A sword had sprung out from somewhere on Megatronus and lunged towards Soundwave, stabbing into the dust as the other mech swiftly rolled aside. Rather than pull the blade out, Megatronus used his momentum to vault over the other side of it and swing it free. He switched its direction to the left, aiming for Soundwave's back and, from the distant ting of metal, it must have nicked him before he managed to dodge it. He stumbled and Elita's spark jumped, starting to burn against her chamber walls before he recovered in time to parry a closer cut to his servo and return a sharp slice to Megatronus' chest. 

If there was any energon spilled so far, she was too far away to see it, but the crowd below her was cheering anyway. Some of the bots sitting furthest away leapt to their peds and flailed servos like rabid beasts, blocking the view for the bots behind them and almost starting a seated riot. If there was one benefit to her skyward view, at least she wouldn't have her sight interrupted.

The two mechs weren't fighting as ferociously now, but the coiled strength in their servos showed that it wasn't out of weariness. They were sizing each other up, circling from a slight distance. Megatronus didn't have Blackout's weaknesses- he had all the strength, but also co-ordination and strategy to make up for the bulk of his armour. They both must have underestimated each other.

The audience faded into an impatient silence as they waited for something to happen, and even Elita found herself anxious for the next move. As the gladiators circled they gradually fell apart, almost reaching the other ends of the arena before acting simultaneously.

They charged, like bulls about to lock horns, but Soundwave changed course a few nanoklicks before collision. He turned right, circling around in a straight line while his sword swept the ground, drawing a line in the dirt and summoning a sudden cloud of dust in front of him. Megatronus ran right into the dirty mist but didn't emerge from the other side. 

Thumps, clangs, and harsh grunts indicated a struggle inside the cloud, but it was hidden until Megatronus managed to stumble out of it; followed by Soundwave ruthlessly carving his armour apart in his gorgeously dangerous way. Disoriented by the dirt and unable to counter his opponent's strikes, Megatronus was quickly overpowered and forced to the ground with Soundwave's ped pressing down on his back. The sword against his neck discouraged Megatronus from trying to flip up from underneath the victor.

The next step was obvious and anticipated by everyone- the sword plunging through the last of Megatronus' defenses, piercing his spark and drenching the ground in his energon. The crowd cried for the death they'd paid for- surely their shouts must have been heard all the way in Iacon. 

But Soundwave did what Elita suspected he secretly enjoyed doing; he disappointed. His ped lifted up and roughly kicked Megatronus onto his side, and his sword left small energon splatters on his shoulder as he hefted it up. He might have spat on the fallen gladiator if it didn't mean lifting his visor up. Instead he settled with just turning his back on him and baring the long bleeding scar across his spinal strut- the only injury Megatronus managed to give him.

The audience was silent, aside from a few angry mutters and a glass smashing somewhere very near her, and the insect mech was left with the job of trying to salvage the defeated mech's dignity. As Megatronus shoved the organiser's help away while picking himself back up, Soundwave walked through the re-opened doors to the pit.

Elita made her way back downstairs, suddenly not so scared of the dark anymore.


	15. Chapter 15

When Elita made her way back to Soundwave's quarters, he was already there. He rose from a kneeling position on the floor, with his sword stabbed downwards into it. It might have been a prayer of some sorts, but he didn't seem the type to have much faith in Primus. 

The wound on his back was still bleeding a faint river over his protoform. Elita found his cleansing rag again and waited for him to reluctantly accept her help. As she mopped the wound clean, a question bit away at her concentration, bothering her enough for her to finally voice it.

"Why didn't you kill him?"

His muscles tensed under her hand, but his answer was empty of any reaction. "He did not deserve the quick mercy of my blade. Let some other brute sate his bloodlust by tearing him servo from servo." His vents cleared in a huff. "A suitable punishment for his foolishness."

Elita doused the rag in a nearby cleanser basin, wringing it dry with a raised eyeridge. "Foolishness?"

"He does not belong here," Soundwave continued, holding his chin in the tight grip of his hand while the other tapped digits on his thigh. "Him and a horde of other glory and gore hungry mechs. He belongs in the mines, shut off from the world, not paraded before it."

Elita was more hesitant around the edges of the wide cut, wondering if she could agree to the mech who did this kind of damage being called weak. "Well... he must be a good fighter, if he's survived so long."

Her reasoning only earned her a scoff from Soundwave. "Survival does not equate to prowess."

"And yet you take pride in your own survival...?" She knew he'd only mock her confusion, but she was too weary to mask it. 

"Because I've _earned_ my right to live," he said after a sigh. "A mech can hide from enemy scouts on a scorched battlefield and live off the stale energon leaking from his brothers' corpses. That does not change the fact that he is a coward."

Talking with Soundwave was like trying to outrun a turbofox- exhausting and ultimately pointless. Elita wasn't sure why she was even trying, maybe to prove that she could keep up with him in words if not battle prowess.

"You like to talk in analogies, don't you?" she asked.

The fins on his back twitched, almost hitting against her chin. "Intelligent conversation is as rare as jewels down here," he said. "In the face of such a shortage, I make do with my own mind as company."

Elita rolled her optics, confident he couldn't see them, keeping her glossa on a leash as she finished cleaning the cut and reached for a welder to close it. A whole klick had gone without something insulting from Soundwave, and she was starting to content in the silence before he saw fit to fill it. 

"It would not surprise me if you disagree." His vocaliser stilted slightly, as if he was unsure about speaking unprompted. "Mechs like Megatronus believe that anyone with a servo to hold a sword can be a gladiator. They... live off the applause, the false honour and pride that swells them up." He gripped the edge of the worktable now as Elita welded, and his digits almost clawed grooves into the surface. "I might have killed him out of disgust, if I did not mind tainting my blade with his weak blood."

So even Pit murderers had standards. Even knowing the dangers of curiosity, Elita's was piqued as she clasped the parted sides of protoform together. "What do you think will happen to him?"

"Primus willing, he will die soon and another will take his place, as always," Soundwave prophesised, grip easing ever so slightly. "Or, he will become bloated with ambition and believe he is worthy of more than gladiator glory. Then he will do something spectacularly stupid, and only then die for it."

Elita raised an eyeridge, moving her digits aside as she finished the welding. "So he's doomed no matter what?"

"At the risk of sounding cynical... we all are." As soon as Elita's hands left his body Soundwave stood, bunching his back cables together and testing the strength of the patch-job. His helm twitched in a tiny nod before he retrieved his sword from the floor, sweeping it up onto the table. His faceplate turned towards her, energon-stained visor hanging from his digits, red optics causing flares in the dim light. "Life is a commodity here. A very cheap one. I am careful to never forget that."

Like a petrorabbit caught in headlights, Elita was frozen to the spot- but not by fear. Uncertainty was what made her peds feel heavier than the whole planet. Was he trying to tell her that her life meant even less than his? Was he trying to say anything at all, or was it just something to scare her?

She cleared the questions away before they started to cloud her processor. "Have I earned another lesson?" she asked, still unsure what she wanted the answer to be.

Soundwave lifted his optics off her for a nanoklick, digits twitching and rubbing flakes of dried energon together. "Return in a decacycle," he ordered, making her face the ugly scar on his back as he turned. "If you're not too busy sucking spikes, that is." 

 

**xx**

 

"Go on, ask me how it went..."

Elita blinked, blue and silver armour slowly coming into blurry focus. "Huh?"

When her vision sharpened enough, she was greeted with Chromia's frown. "My evening with Ironhide!" the blue femme exclaimed, falling back in her seat with arms bolted across her chest. "Primus, if I wanted a conversation with an empty processor, I'd just sit with Twirl."

Elita's optics closed over, audios wincing away from an offended claim of "I HEARD THAT!" from a few seats away. The bruises from the day were only just starting to bloom under her armour. "How did it go?" she asked wearily.

"Lovely, thank you for asking," Chromia said with a cordial smile, polishing off an energon cube. "What about your date with your little sparkbreaker?"

"Soundwave," Elita sighed, resisting the urge to rub her helm with the ache in her servos growing by the klick.

"Yeah, that guy."

She didn't have much strength to spare for arguments, but one came out her mouth anyway. "It wasn't a _date_ , it was... it was a training session." 

Chromia straightened up. "Ooh, have gladiators got a 'no dating' policy now?" She snorted, splaying her servos on the armrests of her chair. "Never stopped them from getting femmes off the street before."

Elita grunted a sigh. How many bots actually thought she was out fragging someone? "If you must know, he's teaching me out to fight." A more accurate description would have been 'painting pain all over her frame', but the last thing she needed was Chromia dragging her over to Minerva and the medic's disapproval stripping her down to bruise-speckled protoform. 

Chromia just snorted again, propping her legs on the furthest side of her seat. "You don't need to _learn_ how to fight. A mech gets up your aft, just kick him wherever he wants sucked. And another to the helm for good measure," she said with a shrug. 

Even Elita's eyeridge protested as it lifted up. "Ironhide teach you that?"

Chromia shrugged again. "You'd be surprised how few mechs have proper armour for their codpieces."

Only Elita's lips didn't seem to hurt, tilting upwards as amused air blew out her olfactories. "Well, not all of us are armories in lingerie like you, Mia."

Chromia copied her friend's smile with her own twist of mischief. "As long as Ironhide ain't complaining, I ain't changing." The blue femme stretched out, the very sight of which made Elita wince- she wouldn't be able to do much of anything with her limbs until they stopped threatening to fall out their joints. 

"What's Soundwave like, anyway?" Chromia asked, locking her digits together. "Any of the usual gladiator stories true?"

Elita tried to let her seat cradle her as she sat back, but the soft backing only seemed to put more pressure on her hidden welts. "I don't know about the others, but Soundwave..." She had too much to say about him, so she tried to stick to what came up most when she thought of him. "He's rude, bitter, cynical, confusing. Basically bot repellent on some very talented legs."

Chromia's confusion mismatched her snorting grin. "Then why keep going back to him?" she asked in a laugh.

On any other day Elita may have never be able to answer that, bu possibilities were fighting for her attention. Only one of them was both the most and least ridiculous of all of them. 

"...I think he likes me."


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was planning to make this coincide with the next chapter of Promise but then I remembered I'm a lazy shit so here we are.

Either a shortage of wanting mechs or credits to waste gave Elita far more free time than would have made sense for a working bot. Not that she was complaining- she'd saved enough from her first payment to last long enough, and she still had dance assignments with other femmes that could actually move their peds without tripping. And it meant, whether he liked it or not, her sessions with Soundwave quickly became a daily occurrence. 

At least he'd stopped calling her a harlot now.

"You might find yourself in less pain if you tried parrying once in a while," he advised, only slightly more useful than the usual sarcastic wisdom he was only too happy to dispense while she nursed new bruises. There was less appearing every solar cycle as she slowly learned how to predict his moves, but she still had enough to warrant awkward questions if she left any inch of protoform uncovered back in Praxus. From his place at Soundwave's peds, Ravage mostly ignored her-he usually did now that she was spending every day in his master's quarters. 

"And yet _you_ get away with just letting mechs cut you to ribbons out there?" she asked, holding in a wince as she rubbed comfort into the most tender parts of her frame. As well as learning to deflect attacks, she was even starting to snap back at his verbal jabs. Either she was blending into him, or she knew he wouldn't actually be faithful to all his death threats. He actually seemed to enjoy being sassed, if only because it gave him the chance to regain the upper hand all over again.

His back was turned on the never-ending job of sword polishing and his visor firmly clamped down anyway, so the only smugness she could see was in the flex of his neck cables as they tilted his helm up. "It's different for gladiators," he said, affecting frustration at having to explain something so obvious to him and him alone. "Scarred protoform doesn't bruise after so long."

Elita rolled her optics, bracing for another speech about survival she saw coming a mile away. "Well, you haven't had to deal with numb aft-plating after sitting in a shuttle for four breems every day."

Rather than launch into a spiel of superiority, Soundwave offered one of his condescending almost-snorts to her. "And why not save yourself discomfort and use your alt mode instead?"

The question caught Elita so suddenly that she reeled and dropped her practice rod. The truth flashed in her processor so bright that she had to blink to see anything, and only after her HUD cleared did she see that it landed right by Ravage's glinting claws. "I, uh...." Her digits trembled as they fumbled for grip on the fallen stick. She tried to ignore Ravage staring and growling softly from under the desk as she hefted it up. "Well, I don't have one." She mumbled, hoping Soundwave wouldn't care enough to ask for a repeat.

Turns out he didn't need to ask- he'd heard her anyway. His tone was little more than disgust. "Are pleasure femmes really so useless that alt modes aren't allowed?"

It was hardly the most damning insult she'd heard, but Elita had heard enough of them over the decacycles that they'd reached critical mass, boiling under her skin. This one hit the core of her spark and burrowed deep, creating a corrosive itch in her chamber that she could only scratch at with a scowl and a sudden snarl. "No.... I was born with a faulty T-Cog. I couldn't transform even if I wanted to, alright?" A piercing snap echoed from her digits, forcing her to look down. She'd gripped the rod so fiercely it had splintered into two pieces. She kept looking at her peds as she held the broken parts in shaking hands, preparing for another endless volley of insults for her anger and already flinching away. 

Soundwave must have just been staring at her for the long nanoklicks that passed, before he walked forward slowly with near-silent scuffs. "I see." She'd never heard him speak so quietly- even Ravage seemed perplexed as he lifted his muzzle in the space between the two bots. Elita's optics flicked up mostly out of surprise, and they showed his uncovered faceplate carved in regret. "I apologise for my presumption. That was... disrespectful of me."

He stretched his servos out and took the splintered sword pieces from her frozen fingers, brushing his own spindly digits slightly along them. It was only when he'd returned to his desk that Elita regained her motor functions, and her glossa was the first thing to shift. "Well, it's... not the worst thing you can get from a sparkling farm." That much was true at least- she was fortunate not to be birthed with a deformed spark and only a bulging chestplate containing it.

Soundwave inclined his helm towards her as his hands still worked away. "I thought the farms were tailored to producing warriors for Iacon," he said, with no hint of shock at her origins. For all she knew, he saw her factory birth in her own processor when he looked into her optics. Or, somehow a more chilling possibility, he didn't need his visor to conceal himself.

"Most of them were, but..." She shrugged at the sad planet-wide truth. "There's shortages in all the castes nowadays." If the farms themselves were a badly kept secret, the Well's flagging production and the reason for them existing was a heavily dismissed fact.

Elita shook her helm, and curiosity took the place of despair. "Did you know your creators, Soundwave?"

The mech's arms paused, and he seemed to debate on whether to answer or not. "...One of them," he finally relented, swivelling himself to face her. "Liege Maximo. My sire." As he lowered himself onto a slab of a bench, Ravage slinked from his hiding place to lay his helm on Soundwave's thigh. "To this day, he lives on in the arena's record books. Most battles won, and most opponents fought in a single event." His digits idly rubbed Ravage's helm as he spoke, and the cirkitten purred lightly. "That was before I was delivered to him by my carrier. Like you, I do not know who she is, only that she was a Seeker. I... never cared to know anything more."

Elita found her lipplates heavy, and her processor bringing up nothing but blanks on what to say. She doubted that Soundwave had ever revealed such a personal part of himself before, certainly never to someone like her. She was almost scared to speak, out of fear of breaking whatever trance he was in. For the first time since their run-in so long ago, he almost seemed... vulnerable. 

She wasn't sure if she was comfortable with it. Better to break the somberness rather than let it linger too long. She cleared her vocaliser before intruding on Soundwave's peace. "He named himself after one of the Primes?"

Soundwave straightened slightly, blinked several times and then huffed, a reluctant acknowledgement of the irony. His hand fell from Ravage's muzzle, but the beast still stayed by his peds. "It was a less ubiquitous trend back then," he claimed. "Bots were more imaginative with their Gladionyms."

"Their what?"

"A gladiator has two names," he explained. "The one given at birth, and the one the crowds place their wagers on. The latter are Gladionyms, purely for show, often chosen by sponsors or Pit managers for maximum profit from their champions." Then the long-dead ghost of a smile flickered in the shadow of his faceplate. "It is similar with Art caste femmes, is it not?"

Elita froze for the second time that day. She met Soundwave's gaze cautiously, unable to read it. "How do you know that?" she asked.

"The same way I know your kind has notoriously flimsy valve panels," Soundwave said. "Where interface is concerned, most prefer to be called by their birth name rather than the one plastered on for an audience. In my experience, at least."

And again, Elita's mouth was empty of words. Soundwave himself had mentioned he spent time with pleasure femmes, but it was different knowing he'd bedded ones just like her. All of his remarks about infidelity were cast in a new light- they stemmed from more than just judgement and bitterness. 

Even so, it was hard not to simmer in anger whenever he opened his mouth and a dagger of contempt came flying out towards her spark. 

"And you... did you choose 'Elita' because it sounded pretty?" he asked, doing exactly that all over again.

"It's my job to be pretty, isn't it?" she snapped, folding her servos over and wondering how on Cybertron she got dragged into a debate on cybolinguistics. "So so what if I did?"

It was hard to tell with his helm dipped, but there was a twitch on Soundwave's faceplate. She recognised it as smiling. "And what of the name you _didn't_ choose?" he pressed on.

Two nanoklicks passed before Elita realised what he meant, and her eyeridges took longer to furrow in confusion. "...You want to know my birth one?"

"I would be lying if I said I wasn't curious," he said in complete neutrality.

"Couldn't you just pluck it out of my processor?" she suggested, with a miming of her hand literally pulling something from inside her helm. She assumed something as innocuous as a name wouldn't be hard for a telepath to chase out of her consciousness. 

She must have been right, as the only thing on his faceplate that shifted was a newly raised eyeridge. "And where would the surprise lie in doing that?"

'Ariel' was the name Elita had through her Academy days, the one Orion had always said so fondly to her. One word with so much meaning to her... even if Soundwave's intentions were purely for curiosity's sake, she was hesitant to tell him. In a way, it was all she had left of her youth. Besides, the tables had firmly turned for them both now. For once, _she_ had something _he_ wanted. And she didn't need an insulting comparison to a petrorabbits brain to tell her how foolish she'd be to give it up so easily. 

"You first, then."

Now it was Soundwave's turn to show confusion, if only a distilled version of it. Then it registered that she wanted his name, his _real_ one given by the illustrious Liege Maximo. As she expected, he just shook his helm and rose from his seat, letting Ravage trail him back to his weaponry workspace. 

With nothing more to say and no pains to stop her moving, Elita went for the door. He'd tell her someday, when he was in another mood for sharing. Even without a telepath's mind, she was sure of it.

"Hang onto that attitude while you can," Soundwave called back as the door hinges squealed. "A sharp glossa can be worth more than a sharp blade." It was the only useful thing he'd said all day.


	17. Chapter 17

Nightfall seemed to arrive much quicker over the breems she spent with Soundwave, with a wall of darkness hitting her when she finally left the arena. Unlike Praxus and its neon-gilded air, the only light Kaon's streets offered were from the occasional violet lamps studding the edges of the streets, most only giving out a flickering illusion of safety from the evening's demons. Luckily for Elita, she knew the way to the shuttle station by spark now, not even stopping to investigate scuffs and phantom snarls from the depths of branching alleyways creating canyons between the starscrapers along both sides of her. If she could survive both Starscream and Soundwave's company, then Kaon's underbelly didn't hold much threat to her. Though still weary from her training, her limbs were almost itching to try their new strength against someone who wasn't a fully fledged gladiator. 

When she reached the oddly deserted station, she settled to wait for a shuttle on the least rust-stained bench. She didn't bother with pulling her hood up, content with the light breeze of fumes flowing past her faceplate as long as she kept her olfactories closed. 

Klicks ticked by unnoticed, and there was a clap of metal on metal from the station stairs so light that Elita almost missed it. The sound continued towards her though, along with a pair of familiar red optics only at height with her kneeplates. When she noticed them she jumped in her seat, almost thinking they were Soundwave's before she saw the jagged edge of a tail occasionally snaking into view. Ravage stopped some distance in front of her, just on the edge of a pool of light thrown by the lamp next to her. With all the darkness around him, he blended completely into the night whenever he blinked. 

"Hey, boy..." she said slowly, tilting her helm curiously. Ravage seemed to copy her, rising from his haunches to pad hesitantly forward. Elita cautiously held out a servo, keeping her hand level with Ravage. "Does Soundwave know you're out here?"

If the animal understood her he couldn't do much to answer; instead he stopped again in front of her hand, hovering his olfactories over her digits and covering her palm with warm vents. Fibre optic strands covering his muzzle tickled against her wrist and almost made her forget about the razors hidden in his paws. Something he smelled or sensed must have told him something, as he dragged a rough glossa over her knuckles with a purr making the surface vibrate against her armour.

Still recovering from his sudden appearance, Elita almost didn't believe Ravage was treating her with such affection- believing that he was even capable of it, knowing a mech like Soundwave reared him. Her shaking faded as her hand curved carefully around his muzzle, scratching the side of his helm and letting him push into her palm. "You're just a big sweetie on the inside, aren't you?" she asked softly. His purrs grew louder the closer her digits stroked to his audio flaps, and they flattened to let her rub them more effectively. His glossa stuck out slightly from his mouth, hanging limply as he blinked slowly at her. If he was a stray, Elita would have been sorely tempted to take him home with her. 

"Careful with the local wildlife, dear. All sorts of diseases and rust on them..." She heard Ravage's hiss before Ratbat's voice, and by the time she turned towards the latter the cirkitten had fled into the shadows. Other than his crest fur looking ruffled, Ratbat hadn't changed since their last meeting decacyles ago. 

"Are you following me, Senator?" she asked, only half-playfully. 

"Not at all," Ratbat replied with an equally convincing smile, stepping closer and casting a furred shadow over her. "I had another political assignment nearby- no Starscream this time, thank Primus. And I trust no Seekers have been trying to fly you off your peds recently?"

"No, I've... I guess I'm on hold for now," Elita answered, expecting him to take the seat next to her- though he seemed to insist on standing as he nodded down at her. 

"You should make good use of that time, dear. When its over, I imagine mechs worse than even Starscream will be out to purchase your company..."

Elita had spent almost a vorn with a mech worse than Starscream, so his grim prophecy didn't do much to phase her. "I've been meaning to thank you for the flower you sent," she said, eager to turn the conversation elsewhere. "It was lovely."

Ratbat's crest seemed to fluff up even more as he grinned and lowered his helm humbly. "No trouble at all, dear," he said with a lazy wave of his servo. "I'm a believer that beauty is rare in this universe... we must all make an effort to preserve it." He coughed into a bundle of claws. "Though I must ask, since you don't have any mechs hanging off your servos, what has brought you back to this dark little corner of Cybertron..." 

Elita might have just dismissed the suspicion his tone dripped as casual curiosity, if she hadn't heard Soundwave soak his own vocaliser in it before. "I like visiting friends," she said, as vaguely as possible. 

Ratbat curled his lips into a dipped line, a row of fangs propping over it. "Well, I'm afraid they have very poor taste in housing..." he said slowly, dropping his voice more with each word. "Though, I suppose _gladiators_ don't have much choice."

Elita forced one of her eyeridges to shoot up even as her faceplate flooded with a blush. "What makes you think I've been near gladiators?" She could practically feel the surface of her voice cracking under the weight of being discovered, and Ratbat's spawning smile seemed to sense it as well.

"No offence intended, Elita, but you reek of the pits," he said, actually crinkling his olfactories. "That tell-tale mixture of smoke and grease and death... I used to carry it around every day until I retired."

Just as well she hadn't tried an outright lie. She gulped down the lump of guilt in her throat. "I see..."

Ratbat shrugged his wings as if lying was part of his job- well, he was a politician. "Nothing a quick solvent shower can't fix, though I must advise against holding onto to any ties in Kaon; gladiators or otherwise."

Now Elita's surprise was genuine. She was used to Chromia calling her an idiot every time she left for the arenas, but that was only because if the worst befell Elita she wouldn't have anyone to shove chores off onto. "And why do you say that?"

The weight of Ratbat's wings seemed to fail his joints. They fell at the same time as his mouth, which hardened into a severe line. "This city can... do things to a bot, even those only visiting. No more so than gladiators, those who make up the entirety of Kaon's culture." Then his faceplate softened, as if someone shone a sun's heat onto it. "I just don't want you getting yourself hurt, Elita." 

She almost laughed as all her bruises throbbed across her protoform, thinking to herself ' _Too late for that_ '. "Believe it or not, Senator, I can defend myself," she said.

"I'm sure you can," he countered, only barely hiding a new patronising tone that made her bruises bristle under her robes. "But you're in a city where bots have been doing that since sparklinghood. I'd be loathe to think of a mugger or some other undesirable cornering you on a night like this."

She gave a polite, trained smile up at him. "I appreciate the worry, Ratbat..." Under her robes, she felt her digits clench into involuntary fists again. "But it's not necessary."

There was a silence broken only by an ambient hum of a Enforcer patrol craft skimming the skies overhead, and the crackle of electricity from broken street lights. "If you say so," Ratbat eventually conceded, lowering his wings so the curved tips almost touched the ground. She couldn't tell if he wanted to say any more, but the encroaching grumble of an expensive engine interrupted both bot's thoughts. 

"Ah, there's my shuttle," Ratbat announced, looking back down the station steps to where a vehicle similar to Starscream's lay waiting, even attended by the same pristine looking drones. As he descended towards it, he turned back to Elita and this time he was the one looking up at her. "Can I at least offer you a lift back to Praxus?" he asked, fangs glinting in the street's single neon spotlight. 

Elita shook her helm. "I'm honoured, Senator, but I haven't been killed by a public shuttle just yet. I'll be fine."

"Very well." Ratbat boarded his shuttle, shuffling his wings so they'd fit through the door, and gave her an official wave goodbye. "Until next time, dancer dear."

As his chariot faded into the night, Ravage came into sight again and padded back to his place in front of her. She could feel a growl in his muzzle as she stroked it.

"You don't like him, boy?" she asked, and his own fangs flashed out in what seemed to be agreement. 

"I dunno..." Elita sighed, scratching behind a panel and looking out for any more approaching shuttles. "He's a lot nicer than your owner."

Though the cirkitten pulled his lips back down over his denta, his cautious growls refused to budge. 

 

**xx**

If anyone gets impatient for the next chapter, I do have exclusive pictures of the actual ending here: http://nitrostation.tumblr.com/post/137982897432/dance-with-the-devil-spoilers


	18. Chapter 18

For the first time since her training began, Soundwave didn't greet her with a sword in her face. As Elita inched around the door, he didn't even turn from his worktop, as if he'd been standing there ever since she left. She wondered if he ever recharged, and noticed Ravage lying like a lump of obsidian within a half-hidden alcove to Soundwave's side. At least he had a berth, even if his pet used it more than him.

"What, no rehearsal of last night? No drills, no stretches?" Elita's relief at something different, a rest for her strained cables, was eclipsed by suspicion. 

"Not yet. You are troubled," Soundwave answered, throwing aside what looked like a pair of practice rods as he turned towards her. 

"You can tell from all across the room?" His perception really shouldn't have surprised her by now, but she still blinked in disbelief. 

"Your EM field is erratic. I can feel it buzzing, like you have an Insecticon hive following you," he noted, reading her like a datapad. 

"I guess I am..."

Soundwave nodded, knowing he was right even without her acknowledging it. "It would be counter-intuitive to continue any work if you cannot focus on it," he said, and Elita couldn't tell if it was just a statement of fact, or some kind of warning. Either way, she wouldn't be getting anywhere today until she dealt with what had been giving her processor terrors all night.

"...Do you know about a mech called Ratbat?" she eventually asked, slowly pulling a seat over to the wall where'd she'd been standing. Nowadays it seemed she could only relax in a chair, and while in sight in an exit.

"I am aware of him," Soundwave answered, in a tone as blank as his faceplate.

"That doesn't really answer my question," Elita said, and something harder than impatience broke through the mech's expression. Air shimmered into his vents as a slow intake saved him from having to give a proper reply, if only for a few nanoklicks.

"If you are asking whether I know of his past concerning the pits, then yes."

Elita had suspected as much, remembering the Senator himself lamenting over his old position in life; even if it didn't make much sense for him to miss it. "He was once in charge of them, right?"

Soundwave watched her through narrowed optics, as if trying to decipher her intent. Even knowing she wasn't guilty of anything, Elita felt herself tense under the scrutiny. "Before my time... but my sire knew him. He preferred to refer to him with curses than by name." Soundwave eventually admitted, while slow steps brought him closer to her and a spindly digit snapped up to accuse her. "And if _you_ are involved in any way with him-"

"What do you mean by 'involved'?" Elita interrupted, pressing her optics into a similar squint up at him. Her defensiveness, warranted or not, only amused him after he got over the surprise of being talked back to- or whatever it was that darkened his optics.

"You should know, glued to his side and staring at him like he was Prima reincarnated. Though with a Seeker as your only alternative for company, I suppose the blame isn't all yours." A smile twitched across his mouth when he saw, or felt, her blushing. That first evening he'd been watching her just as much as she'd admired him, and she almost thought that was the reason her faceplate felt so hot. Whatever the reason for it, Soundwave didn't care. He was already retracing his steps back to his table. "Concerning yourself with a Senator is worse than pointless. Politics are no place for someone like you," he said, with that undercurrent laugh wreathed in his voice that made him sound like he was lecturing a sparkling, and in turn made Elita's jaw clench to hold her denta gritted together.

"Oh, what, am I too _dumb_?" she asked, throwing her servos out as if addressing an audience that she wanted to strangle. "Is a 'dancer' just not good enough to understand everything that's wrong with the whole planet? I can live through all the slag that the Senate throws down at us, but I can't _possibly_ understand it, huh?"

Soundwave watched her tantrum collapsing in on itself with all the emotion of a drone, but his voice came out strangely hushed. "I didn't mean that. I only meant... it's a dangerous stage to place yourself on. Physical strength, skills built over stellar cycles won't get anyone far, you need... something more than just intelligence. Why else would it be such a privileged caste? Not even my sire would have survived long in an Iacon court."

Elita calmed herself, heavy vents subsiding, and she was almost convinced she heard some concern lurking in the gladiator's tone. The most genuine thing she'd heard from him outside of insults, and she wasn't even sure if it was there. "You're... scared I might get hurt?" 

She wasn't expecting a straightforward confession of Soundwave actually having an emotional spectrum, but not even a thick layer of condescension could bury his distress. It was what was making his vocaliser waver like a broken modulator, and no doubt he would have played it off as a battle injury if she asked. "Your irregular stupidity makes me concerned for your welfare, yes. If you ever must dirty your hands with politics, at least have the sense to hide how much you know- or care. The ilk of senators do not appreciate competition, no matter how pretty it is to look at."

Elita wasn't sure what to be surprised at first; the sincere advice or the compliment that slapped her in the face. Whether or not Soundwave realised the praise had slipped out, she had no idea how to respond to it, if she should even. "Well... good to know _you_ care," she eventually muttered.

"Someone has to," Soundwave gruffly replied, slipping right back into his comfortable mould of 'walking pain in the aft'. 

"Well, don't bother... cause I already have someone," Elita said as her processor started to skip over itself, trying to think of someway to have the last word and with only one bot coming to mind, like he always did one way or another. "Not Ratbat," she quickly added at Soundwave's skeptical stare, though the assurance only seemed to harden his faceplate into that image of borderline scowling and optics that could melt through ore. 

"You picked up a knight in shining armour between fighting like an Empurata and licking your wounds?" he asked, and she held back her servos from colliding with navy armour with nothing but the will of her frown and the flood of memories starting to submerge her.

"There was one mech I once knew... Orion Pax." She trailed off, so his name was a dwindling whisper. 

"You love him," Soundwave said almost instantly, and the truth of it spoken aloud after so long managed to startle her; never mind that he knew it so quickly.

"Is it that obvious?" she asked.

Soundwave allowed himself a shallow vent of air before answering. "Only when you say his name." Whatever the rattle underneath his voice was, Elita wasn't sure if she wanted to know. Falling forward in her seat, spinal strut sagging, the after images of Orion and the time spent with him, too little as it was, burned in her optics and threatened to spill out as coolant. She was rambling just to stop the memories crowding in so much. 

"Before we were sorted into our castes, we attended the same academy, in Iacon. He's Well-born, no parents, so... I didn't feel out of place around him. I didn't need to compensate for a childhood neither of us had. Then came graduation, he got data clerk duty in Iacon, and... I was shipped off to Praxus, obviously." Elita shrugged, heaving out the rest of her air through nostalgia-clogged vents, wreathing limp digits through themselves with her helm bowed in some kind of surrender to reality. 

"Did he love you?" Soundwave asked after a moment, and even though she didn't need to think about it she ended up hesitating anyway. 

"...He said he did."

"And did you believe him?"

"Of course. But... that was a while ago. For all I know he's found love with another femme. I wouldn't blame him." Her servos ended up crossed over her chest, and she was already trying to imagine how much Orion must have changed in that time compared to her. He was a handsome mech, and time would only make him even more so. She wouldn't expect him to wait for her anymore than she was expecting Soundwave's next question. 

"...Do you really think you are that easily forgettable?" 

His back was turned before her optics could drag themselves up to his faceplate, for any clue to deciphering what he meant by that. Too subtle to be a chide in disguise, too... quiet to be sarcasm. Confusion dulled her nodes as her processor tried to analyse, so she jumped when a thin bar of tapered steel came clattering into her lap. Even Ravage perked up from his alcove, ear panels flicking at motes hovering around him. 

"If that is all, we've wasted enough time today," Soundwave said in his dull monotone, wielding another rod not quite as sharp as his sword but with a similar painstaking sheen to it. "You know the basics now, how to dodge blows coming a mile away at least. I think you will enjoy this next part."

Gripping the bar uncertainly, the cold biting into her digits, Elita rose from her seat and tried to mirror his strangely loose stance. "Why's that?" she asked.

A smile, not unheard of on Soundwave but rare enough it might as well have been, dawned on her from across the room. "This is where dancing and fighting become one." Then, like an unbroken tide, he rushed towards her.


	19. Chapter 19

"'Lita? Yoo hoo, Elita! ELITA!"

Chromia's impatience climaxed in a ringing bellow echoing in Elita's audios, and the pink femme snapped upwards so quickly she almost helm-butted her blue friend hovering over the couch. Elita wasn't sure how long she'd been taking up the entire length of the lounge, but not long enough for the ringing ache in her joints to fade. 

"If you're done being in stasis lock, I'd like to get a seat that isn't one of your legs," Chromia said, budging Elita's peds away exactly where they hurt the most. The pink femme felt her jaw stretch, but forced her vocaliser to mute before a pained whine could get out. It didn't stop Chromia giving her a look like she'd just sat next to a Quintesson.

"You... feeling alright?" she asked, and Elita couldn't even summon the energy to lie about the slow burning agony laced in every inch of her frame.

"I feel like I've just been caught in the middle of an electrequus stampede," she admitted, and that was before she had to hike all the way back to Praxus and the Cyberos building.

"Yikes," Chromia mumbled under her vents.

"No, Chromia, it's _good_ ," Elita added, elation glowing in her wide optics even though the rest of her body refused to move without protesting loudly. "I mean... today, with Soundwave, I wasn't just trying to slap him with a stick or get out of his way. It was... I don't even know how to describe it." Her helm tipped back and she stared at the ceiling, replaying every nanoklick of the enchanting session. It was more than sparring, more than just clanking her peds into place and wobbling away from strikes. When his servo reached out, his sword only an extension of it, she knew where she had to be to complement him. Their moves were seamless, peds gliding effortlessly across the floor, each rehearsal only lasting klicks before it was locked into her processor. Choreography, something she knew in the core of her spark, blended with fighting to create something utterly new to her, and utterly wonderful. The pain of the exertion only set in after the breems passed by like water rushing past her, and she didn't even mind it. 

"You fragged him, didn't you?" Chromia asked, completely shattering Elita's memory just when she was getting to the part where she finally managed to hit him back.

"What? No!" She blinked wildly and flinched back even with her spinal strut trying not to collapse. "No, I... he finally showed me how to dance."

Chromia didn't look impressed with the awe across Elita's face as she bent down to pluck a datapad from the table in front of them. "Isn't that what we've all been doing for the past three stellar cycles? I sure as the Pit didn't need to go to Kaon every day to learn how to put one ped in front of the other."

Elita glowered at her friend, though Chromia couldn't see over her screen . "You can be bitter all you want, Mia, but I'm telling you Soundwave was-"

"Elita." Neither of them had noticed how silent the rest of the room had went until they heard Beta's voice from the doorway, and saw her standing there with a frown to shame Megatronus Prime. "My office, quick as you can." In Beta speak, that meant 'right fragging now'. Chromia recognised it just as well, and she flashed Elita a very unhelpful grimace as her friend marched off obediently to whatever she'd managed to do without even knowing.

"Is something wrong, Beta?" Elita asked, keeping her voice in an illusion of calm that she was very far from feeling. Though there was a seat opposite the desk in Beta's office, she thought she'd be safer standing. 

Beta creased her eyeridges, swiping a datapad into one hand and holding the screen out for Elita to see. "Only the transport pass bill I got today that's longer than my fragging desk," she deadpanned, letting Elita gasp at the charges for all her shuttle visits out to Kaon, every single one for the past three vorns- ever since she started seeing Soundwave.

"Well... how do you know I have anything to do with it?" Elita lied, almost thinking she'd get away with it if she resisted the urge to twist her digits into braids. 

"Because, pardon my bluntness, you're the only one here who'd even need to use shuttles in between here and Kaon. Besides, you pretty much just admitted it. Someone innocent wouldn't defend themselves from something they didn't do." 

Elita really should have known better than to try tricking someone like her, and her servos sagged more from guilt than the weight of the datapad. "Right..." 

To Beta's credit, she at least toned down the smug glint in her optics when remorse pulled on Elita's expression, seating herself behind her desk and slumping back in her chair. "So what's the excuse, Elita? Some new boyfriend out there you're planning on running away with?"

Elita had already decided to just be honest with Beta, but a very rebellious part of her spark was tempting her to answer yes... after all, what really qualified as a boyfriend when you were paid for interface? "Actually, Beta, I was... training. New dance techniques, from an expert. N-Not that the instructors don't do a good job, I just... wanted to learn some new things as well..."

Even if it wasn't for her stuttering, Elita knew it sounded like she was lying before she saw Beta's unchanged deadpan. "You seriously expect me to believe that?" But, surprisingly, she only shrugged and crossed her servos on top of her desk. "Whatever, as long as you're back here before curfew, I really don't care if you're banging a drone in your spare time. What I do care about is femmes freeloading off my generous good will."

"I can pay it back-!" Elita insisted, only to be cut off by a digit jabbing in her face.

"Oh, you will, but with the time it'll take for you to work it off on a stage I might as well just sell you for scrap to the Institute." Beta's tone was so similar to one of Soundwave's that Elita could only stare at her as hundreds of horror movies involving her chassis being dissected on a table played past her optics. Then the digit fell from her face as Beta snorted with laughter. "I'm kidding, Elita! Primus, you think I'd just waste talent over something like this?" She rolled her helm and optics simultaneously, shaking out the last of her amusement before affixing seriousness again like a mask bolted to her face. "But seriously, you're gonna need to do a lot more than just shake your plates at some overcharged mechs to pay me back."

Elita already knew what that meant, but she couldn't help confirming her fears as she sank into the seat by her side. "You mean... go on escort duty again?"

"Senator Starscream paid well enough for you, even without the 'added perks'," Beta reminded her, reaching across to lift Elita's chin up when her neck cables could no longer support her aching helm. "Hey, don't look so glum, Elita, if you do well enough that's the whole debt wiped out in one night- with a little extra left over for yourself."

Elita nodded, if only to shake Beta's gentle hand away, and sighed as she tried to shield her stinging optics with their lids. "Who did you have in mind, then?"

Beta was reaching for something in her desk, a larger datapad that she slid over to her. "Luckily for you, we've got a backlog of requests for some kind of ceremony in Vos tomorrow, so I'll let you choose from the eligible bachelors."

Elita took the pad in numb digits, only grateful that they weren't shaking. Most of the mechs seemed to be mid-castes, the types who were in charge of those lower than them. Only one or two Seekers with wings too small for their backs, or maybe they just had unfortunate holopics. All of them looked equally lecherous and willing to pay for a lot more than just an accessory on their servo, and her spark sank the further she scrolled down- until she caught a flash of purple and orange, and a name she recognised. 

"...I think I'll go with him." She passed the datapad back over with her choice highlighted, and Beta squinted at it with a raised eyeridge.

"'Ratbat', huh?" Though she sounded surprised, she only shrugged. "Well, I won't judge when there's a Senator badge on him."


	20. Chapter 20

Outside the club with his furry crest combed in a flare around his helm, wings folded in a regal cape and claws wreathed safely behind his back, Ratbat didn't seem surprised to see Elita descending those small few steps towards him in one of her finer armour sets; the type most femmes only wore once and then left to gather dust, if they ever wore it at all. 

"I never knew my company was so addictive," he said, flashing fangs at her as he bowed, ruffling his wings gently around him. 

"And I never knew we were so popular with Senators," Elita quipped back, wreathing her bare servo around the one Ratbat crooked out towards her.

"Others tend to treat you better if you someone lovely hanging off your servo." He held her close enough that his orange fibers tickled her protoform, though not unpleasantly.

"And are you my lovely someone this evening?" she asked, letting him lift her into his own shuttle as he chuckled.

"Somehow _you've_ only gotten moreso over the decacycles." He took his seat opposite her, in the grasp of plush purple that complimented his armour. It was similar to Starscream's shuttle, yet Elita felt infinitely more comfortable in this one, sinking into her seat and only dimly watching the planet slip by outside the window. She hardly even noticed when Praxus’ neon boundaries ended to give way to Crystal City and the great barren span laid out between its walls and Vos, the Seeker city’s soaring spires waiting beyond.

"Do you know what the party tonight is for?" Elita asked as a cloud of lilleths flitted past the window, rolling together the low sky. Ratbat also watched them, waited until they'd spun away on the air currents before answering.

"The sparkday celebration of the Winglord's daughter, Slipstream,” he said with a slight curl to his mouth. “Starscream is but only one of his four children. And unfortunately, Slipstream seems to take after _all_ her brothers."

Even with how Ratbat grimaced at the thought, Elita was sure Primus made very few bots like Starscream, even within his family. "And will the sparkday star be there?"

"Most likely. Though she'll no doubt keep herself above everyone else, so we won't need to speak to her." Ratbat said nothing of whether Starscream himself would be there, and Elita didn't feel like ruining her good mood by asking. Instead she let the hum of the shuttle along the tracks speak for them both, and occupied herself with admiring Ratbat’s refreshingly peculiar frame until they slowed outside Vos’ Citadel. He wasn't Soundwave with all a gladiator’s rough grace, despite some similarities like the occasional glint of fangs lodged in his mouth, but at least he didn't keep making her expect those fangs to sink into her neck. She thought he might have passed the time pretending to not notice her staring, and his glance over at her while the shuttle lurched to a stop was so probing and knowing that she had to be right, and so dazzling she almost didn't see the door opening to spill them out into the noble crowd. 

If she felt out of place in Kaon, the Citadel made a great effort to replicate that discomfort. A grounder without an alt mode stranded in a sea of fluttering wings with each frame bearing a different family crest, soaring banners overhead disappearing into ceilings so high like skies in themselves that she felt herself falling from just a glance upwards. Everywhere she looked was blinding extravagance reserved only for those born of gold and platinum; a single plate on some armour sets she glimpsed would have cost more than she made in a single good stellar cycle. 

At her side, Ratbat only showed mild distaste for the swarm of Seekers on all sides, but at least he did all the talking for her as he paraded them both. 

"Relax, Elita,” he said softly, waving at a clutch of mechs who only gave the slightest of nods towards him. “Unlike some associates, I won't ask you of anything that wouldn't be appropriate in front of a ballroom." His servo faltered as he turned towards the front of the grand hall, miles of crowds and banquet tables laid out before them both, and he leaned in close so his voice was low. “Speaking of which associates, it seems Starscream has found a poor replacement for you…”

Elita followed his gaze, having to squint across the distance, but Starscream was always so easy to recognise when he wore a scowl to make even Soundwave envious. He had his own purple-gold femme dangling off his side, literally- she was using his frame like some kind of pillar to swing herself back and forth as she whined loud enough for Elita’s audios to pick up.

“Screamy, can we go get some of that glittery energon?’ 

“In a klick, Thunderblast, I have important bots to greet!” Starscream tried to pry her off his servo, but she only tightened her grip and stuck like glue to him. 

_“Booooriiiiiing_. Come ooon, you're not paying me to just stand here all night…”

“They seem perfect for each other,” Elita noted in a whisper to Ratbat, blushing when he laughed and attracted cold glares from bots with something stuck up their afts from how they carried themselves, as if the floor had committed a grave offense against them. 

“Indeed… though I hear it's opposites that attract most efficiently,” Ratbat said back, something very similar to a purr rasping in his vocaliser just as he pulled away, straightening his backstrut to pay pleasantries to a trine drifting past them. Half the time they only nodded, not making optic contact, and the other half flat out ignored him. Yet he still kept smiling with fangs shining in the sparkling lights strung above them. Elita suspected he only gave the greetings to annoy everyone who tried to pretend he wasn't there, after the realisation of why they were doing so hit her; because he was techno-organic, and for whatever reason they were to be shunned. 

“Can I ask you something personal, Senator?” 

He was looking ahead at the front of the hall again, at something Elita couldn't see the significance of, and he nodded. “Please do.”

“How did you manage to find a place in the Iacon Council?” She managed to change it from ‘How did a techno-organic’ to something she hoped was a little less offensive before it got out her vocaliser. But from how he faced her with a quirked eyeridge, some of her meaning must have still managed to slip through.

“You say that like I even have a place.” He let one fang slip over his smirk at her, as if amused at her blush that was too stubborn to go away. “Truthfully, dear, I only got this far by clawing on the heads of everyone else below me. I managed the gladiator pits well enough that the Council was taking notice, even though they'd ‘officially’ banned pit fighting cycles ago.” He formed the quotes with two claws on the hand not currently resting on Elita’s waist, telling her the Council didn't particularly care about their own laws and that he was feeling much friendlier than usual this evening. He leaned in close again, hovering over her shoulder to drop hushed wisdom into her audios while everyone else happily avoided them. “Between you and me, they actually encouraged it. Keep the low castes occupied and killing each other so there's never enough of them around to start a revolt.” 

A few vorns ago, Elita might have been appalled at the thought. But she'd heard far worse tales from Soundwave, ones she knew were true and horrible from how furious he sounded reciting them. Ratbat gave her this knowledge like it was a scrap of gossip about Sentinel Prime passed around the council chambers, and was waiting closely for her reaction as another memory of Soundwave flashed, a very recent one. 

“Fitting, since not many bots survive dealing in politics…” She said it with Liege Maximo in mind and the cautious awe with which Soundwave spoke of him. Ratbat pulled away slowly, studying her with a gaze she didn't want to call accusing but didn't know what else to label them. But then he smirked again, showing both rows of denta to her.

“Very true. I'm at a disadvantage myself, due to my... condition. But at its spark, politics are all about having more processing power than the bot sitting next to you, and Primus help you if you're too slow." He was inching forwards again, following the flow of the masses deeper into the hall, and she was more or less tugged along with him. 

"You don't seem much different than the average mech to me, Senator,” she said, though her personal experience with mechs could hardly be called ‘average’. 

"Kind of you to say, but most aren't so willing to overlook the organic blemish in their precious society. They tolerate me only because I've proven I'm worth tolerating, and because I don't make a fuss."

“The same reason they tolerate pit fighting and prostitution?” Elita muttered the question, but Ratbat heard it clearly enough that it seemed to make him laugh as his claws pressed in slightly sharper on her hip.

“Sort of,” he answered, halting along with the current of Seekers before a stage taken up a wide circle in the center of the hall. “The credits they rake in also help with that.” A talon pressed on his lips stopped her from asking any further, just before a light silence swept through the rest of the flock. When Elita looked at the stage she saw three figures now occupying it; all Seekers, the parents tall on sharp struts in their peds, their purple-teal plated daughter trying to match their height with her wings flared proudly. Just one glance told Elita that Slipstream would become even more devious than Starscream (if she wasn't already), and the parents were much more intriguing to look at anyway. Windscythe fit his name, with wings like reaper blades folded together like Ratbat’s own, and the femme (Cloudchaser, the Senator whispered to Elita while the speechcraft of her husband took over everyone’s attention) looked like an illustration lifted straight from the Covenant and glowing with Primus’ blessing. Or, more likely, glowing from the thin plasma lines set into her armour. But few bots would bother looking close enough to notice, or be as bored as Elita to do so. 

Luckily, when focus returned to her, the speech was over and applause was still thrumming in the air, mixing with the budding notes of music tentatively weaving through the crowds. 

Beside her, Ratbat perked up and looked for the source of the music while smiling idly. “Ah, my favourite song…” Elita saw the audience splitting into groups again, a wide space opening up around the centre stage, and then Ratbat was bowed before her with a servo stretched out.

“Care to dance?”

His claws shone as he held them out to her, so gentle before on her waist, and how could she refuse a smile like that? As soon as her digits were caught, Ratbat pulled her close enough to bury her in his fur, but shoved her away just before then with a servo anchored on hers, dangling her in the air like she had wings hidden away somewhere. The whole movement lasted a nanoklick, if not less, and she was seeing lights as blinking stars in a haze, every other couple a blurr of graceful dizziness. Ratbat at least waited for her to recover, a squeeze of his hand prompting him to pull her back up into a more gentle waltz. It was a standard dance, one of the first any escort learnt, but Elita was far beyond the basics. With the music gently swelling she struggled to hold back from showing off, a hundred lectures from Soundwave ringing in her audios as she let Ratbat haul her numbly across the ballroom. 

But Ratbat, like most mechs, decided to chance his luck. Though he kept one hand reliably on hers, he seemed unable to stop the other one wandering while she was so close to him. First on the small of her back, claws pinching slightly through her thin armour, she felt him try to make its drift downwards accidental, moving to her hip again during certain sweeping motions only to end up further down when she was back against him. And yet when she looked at him, only the brightness of his optics gave away what he was thinking, or hoping for. Like all politicians, this was a mech used to getting what he wanted. And like most femmes of her type, Elita might have accepted that, if she hadn't been training for moments like this for long decacycles. 

She waited until he went for another spin, this time moving her ped the other way so she was pulling on Ratbat and all his weight, then letting him fall from one hand before sidestepping to catch him in the other. And it was so quick no one else took notice, even Ratbat’s own shock was delayed until they were opposite each other again. In a gladiator arena, he might have been dead. That was what Soundwave always told her when she got a move wrong, especially the feinting one she'd just managed to pull off.

Though surely Ratbat must have recognised it, wondered what she was doing, he only acknowledged such thoughts with his other eyeridge raised, and it didn't go down once as she slipped into other maneuvers her body seemed to know automatically, each muscle clenching and cable going taut without her even noticing. That was how she could spend breems dancing with Soundwave and only realise how much she ached afterwards, and perhaps why Ratbat let her take over the lead. His optics were bright with something else now, mesmerised mirrors of the curious glances from elsewhere around them, and when the music reached its flourishing end most couples were too busy watching them to finish their own dances properly. Only now did Elita hand back control to Ratbat, one servo draped around his neck and balled in his crest as he dipped her with legs tangled and optics locked together.

“And where did you learn to dance like that?” he asked, breathless with small bouts of chuckles.

“A femme has to keep _some_ secrets, Senator,” she said with a flash of her denta, letting him pull her body back up and trying to imagine what a proud Soundwave would look like, if he'd been watching with everyone else.

Ratbat chuckled again, louder yet darker as he realised her with claws still shining. “Of course.”


	21. Chapter 21

Despite, or maybe _because_ of the display Elita had made with the Senator, Ratbat actually paid enough that she got Beta off her back with enough left over for the shuttle to Kaon the next morning. She'd long since stopped shivering every time she walked through the channels of the pits, but for the first time she now felt confidence swelling in her with each step. 

Confidence that evaporated as soon as she was met with a wall of crackling static in Soundwave's quarters, but at least it prepared her for facing the gladiator's sudden fizzling anger, once she realised what he was angry about. 

"I'm sorry I couldn't come yesterday. I...I was-"

Soundwave cut her off with the hiss of a sharpening plane across his sword, identical to the one that came out his vents. "Flaunting yourself in front of your Senator. I know."

And now Elita's EM field matched well with Soundwave's actually making his flinch away as hers flared out to collide with it. "Ratbat is not _my_ Senator. And just how do you know what I do outside of Kaon?"

Soundwave only turned his helm over his shoulder, as always finding her fury more amusing than threatening. "At least you don't try to deny it. Where Ratbat is concerned, those who used to toil under his watch tend to return the favour to him. And certain reliable gladiators reported a 'lovely pink femme' sweeping the Senator off his peds last night." He crossed to the other side of the room as he spoke, and when he passed Elita his field had returned to a dull magnetic simmer, actually soothing her own even as she tensed at the thought of being watched by bots she'd never met. Though she supposed it wasn't much worse than strangers watching her dance on a stage.

"And how do you know they're reliable?" she asked. 

"Because they're still alive after all this time," Soundwave answered curtly, pausing by Ravage as he lounged on a pile of rags to scratch at his head. "...They also said she danced like she was on the edge of survival." He said it as a passive messenger, but he looked at her with obvious pride, so obvious that Elita was left at a loss with what to say to it.

"Well... that's how you taught me," she said with a shrug, blushing as he pushed out one of his rough chuckles along with... something else. A lurking sound that hissed under his vents, faint clicks over a current of rumbling snarls that sounded fresh from an Insecticon's maw. She'd heard hushed snippets of the sound over the decacycles, usually while he knelt down and when he probably thought she was too busy with her bruises to listen.

"What did you just say?" she finally asked. Soundwave was kneeling, combing through his clutter for something, and his helm perked up as she spoke to look at her in surprise. 

"Ancient Kaonic," he said, still holding some of the snarl in his vocaliser until he remembered to clear it with a cough. "Something my sire passed on. It is part of a prayer I often incite before battles."

"Never thought you'd be the religious type," she said.

"Not for Primus, at least," he muttered back.

With the little regard he held for others, that didn't surprise her. "Then who?"

He took a few moments to himself before answering, though all he did was ask another question. "Do you know of the old _Sancastro_ gods and goddesses?" 

Elita blinked, not having to remember back far to be sure she'd never heard of the word before. "I know most Seekers worship Daedalus and his trine, and no one even knows how many things Camiens worship, but other than that..." She shook her helm, curling her servos on her chest in anticipation of a disappointed scoff. 

But Soundwave was silent as he rose to his peds. "It is unlikely you would have heard of them," he told her, taking a seat beside Ravage and letting the cirkitten lay his helm across his lap. "It is a lesser known set of beliefs, aside from your Primus and Unicron. It concerns the existence of _other_ gods, stating that the Thirteen were not the first of Primus' creations."

Elita had taken a seat opposite him, sensing a lecture on the way but glad for anything other than an interrogation about her time with Ratbat. "Like the Caminus demi-gods?" she asked, with more than she'd ever want to know about the city-state crammed into her data banks thanks to bored days spent with very boring femmes. 

"Not quite," Soundwave said, though he flashed a smile at her comparison. "I speak only from what my sire told me, and what I can remember..." He traced digits across Ravage's audio panels as he ordered his thoughts, and Elita waited patiently. 

"Before the Thirteen, Primus had tried creating his first set of champions. But soon after their birth, they were infected by an evil divine force in the universe, far different from Unicron, one that sought to leech off the energy of their sparks. But they were able to overcome the force, tame and master its power, making it a part of them." He paused, waiting for Elita to nod, perhaps testing that he was listening.

"Primus saw what had become of his creations, and he turned his back on them. In his optics, they were corrupted. Some stories say that he was threatened by their power. Whatever his motives, he no longer cared for them. As he exiled them, he then turned his attentions to creating the Thirteen."

Elita could easily see why such legends weren't widespread, the spark attacks Heralds would have if they heard whispers about Primus not being so benevolent after all. And it seemed only fitting that Soundwave would keep those kinds of stories alive. "What did the gods do then?"

"They were bitter, of course. Angry at being cast aside for lesser beings, _inferior_ models. But vengeance was beneath them. They knew that this planet the Thirteen had created would destroy itself one day, inevitably. They were simply content to watch. My Gladionym comes from one of those gods. Soundwave, God of-" He said something in another rough, clicking growl that Elita couldn't decipher. "That is Ancient Kaonic for 'chaos and battle'," he explained.

Why he would choose a God of battle was obvious, but..."Why chaos?"

Ravage growled softly along with his master. "There is no order in the arena. There is simply survival. And the instinct of survival, the essence of _living_... there is no thought involved. Our processors are blind, our sparks deaf when they are in danger. All that exists within the pit are the spectators... and the one they expect you to kill. In those moments, just one mistake can lead to your downfall. One falter, one ped placed wrong or flicker of hesitation and you will not have time to regret it. That, Elita, is where the chaos lies." 

"When I chose Soundwave as my Gladionym, I asked him that chaos be absent from my battles. Without chaos, there is only order and logic. I can work with logic. And if chaos _must_ be watching, then let me control it. Let me tame it, as he did eons ago."

Elita had been holding her vents, numb prickles plaguing her protoform from the weight o each word he hushed out, and they only rasped out when he gave her space to speak. "Are you the only one that chose a God for your name?"

"The only one that I know of. Others conform to the Thirteen; legions of faceless Primas and Vectors acting in parodies of their namesakes. My own sire may have fallen victim to the trend, but not by choice. The least that _I_ can do is honour my Gladionym, and make it worth something more than just a long lost fable before my spark leaves for a brighter place." He dropped his optics away from hers, but not to condescend her. Maybe he'd just lost the strength to hold onto her stare any longer.

"That's a lovely thought," she said quietly, reaching for the hand that dangled limp between his legs. Even slumped over, drained of effort and only slightly brushing her digits back, he was still the most majestic mech she'd ever met. Perhaps even the most noble, depending on how much Orion had changed by now. It was only when he let the walls crumble so close to her that she saw that in him, an old sense of careful dignity glazing his optics over when he managed to bring them up to shine on her smile. 

"And you wonder why I resent those who aim so much lower." Letting go of her digits, he pushed himself upright with Ravage reflexively shifting aside, a new bloom of energy surging behind his cracked armour as he marched to where he knelt before. He spoke as he rummaged, monotone once again.

"Onto business. I'd... like to do something different today." He pulled something out from under a cover of scrap, just as Elita quirked an eyeridge. She didn't recognise it, but it looked older than herself as he placed it on the edge of his worktop. It was only after he brushed dust off, tweaked switches and slipped something inside it, that its purpose hit her audios.

"Is that... _music_?" It was all that it could be, a fuzzy symphony filling the room and chasing the gloom away from the corners; ultraviolas, platinum harps and a thousand other strings all singing together across centuries. The concerta in Vos was grand, but muffled by the grandness of everything else around it. This was a drop of absolute beauty in a sea of horror, and it perfectly complimented Soundwave.

"You are a dancer," he said, stretching a servo out towards her. "And I'd like to dance with you." 

She stared at his hand for a long moment before, for the second time, placing her digits in his palm, letting his gently close over hers as he pulled her towards him. For the first time it struck her was how warm he was, something she'd never noticed while trying to dodge blows from every brutal lunge. Ravage yawned and slipped away silently as the music lilted on, waves of notes wreathing between them as they moved together. He kept her optics locked on his, expecting her to know where to put her peds next by instinct, though that was sparkling's work to someone who'd spent so much time watching him. Elita might have laughed at the whole situation, at the sheer image of dancing with a killing machine, but she was too absorbed in his grace, in the music and his optics, to do anything but mirror him. Without having to worry about being hit or tripped or slammed backwards by a sword, she was right back in that seat watching him dance for the first time. But now she could finally keep up with him, pouring every scrap of energy into matching his dips and twirls and sudden spins. They played each other like instruments, like they were the music, and Soundwave knew exactly what to do with his hands. 

Like Ratbat, he held her, caressed her, explored every inch of her frame; but unlike Ratbat, Elita didn't want to peel his hands away. The drift of his digits blended with that of their bodies together, each touch stealing air from her vents as her spark grew hot from much more than just exertion. Soundwave remained focused, but heavy growls were clawing along her faceplate as he spun her around and pulled her frame parallel to his, her back pressing against his heaving chest and her servos twisted around his, her helm dipped back over his shoulder, just inches away from his. Narrow optics simmered as his digits trailing down her abdomen, as the music reached its end, and as he finally closed the distance between their lips.

All they did was touch, rough scars scraping and warm groans rumbling against her mouth, but Elita still melted. No-one, not even Orion in their youth, had made her body react so desperately. Servos that killed a hundreds bots before her wrapped themselves around her body, coaxing her even closer and letting her feel the similar state of Soundwave's frame. He was holding back, denta and glossa only nipping against her lips, and she could feel the effort it took for him to pull away, resting his forehelm against hers. Surprise, desire, and a buried impatience had Elita smiling against him and falling into those probing, all too wise eyes. Soundwave only flicked them away from hers at a sound, a steady thrum from miles away and passed the thick walls of the arenas.

"It is raining," he mumbled. 

"It is," she breathed back, sighing as his hands moved to brace her hips as they trembled. 

"It would be rude to force you outside in such circumstances."

That evening, Elita realised Soundwave had a berth hidden away from the rust of his quarters. And it was almost as soft as his body arching against hers, painting his scars and bruises into her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AND SO COMMENCETH THE BANGING


	22. Chapter 22

It was probably night outside now, the rain easing off to leave the dark streets slick and even emptier than usual. Probably. Elita didn't care enough about the outside world to be sure. Afterglow drenched her senses, muting anything that wasn't Soundwave. 

She'd felt his bare chest, the pitted and torn skin many times before, but never as close as this. Never as intimately, and never with his servos offering so much safety to her, his spark so warm under her helm. She didn't even need a blanket with their naked protoforms against each other. And with her own armour stripped away, he seemed even more fascinated with what lay underneath, long digits trailing up and down her backstrut. 

"Your protoform... it's soft." His voice was as well, a dull rumble of thunder under Elita, like he was scared of breaking the spell with anything louder. Or maybe he was just as exhausted as she was, weary with the realisation of just how much they cared for each other.

"No bruises for once," she mumbled back, smiling faintly against him. Her body still ached, but in such a different way; a pleasant thrum all along her cytoskeleton, the embers of her spark glowing past the slits of her leaden optics. Every touch Soundwave sprinkled over her skin left a soothing chill, with fireworks breaking underneath along her cables.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked, still carefully quiet, surprising her with sincerity. For all his wits, he'd never asked about what was lurking in her own mind. 

"...How a gladiator can be so gentle," she answered. "And how some femmes expect to be paid for this kind of bliss." She dragged a sigh across his chest as she nestled into his neck. "And what about you?"

"I'm trying not to think… for once.” Occasionally he groaned like a vanquished beast, but not bitter in his defeat. More relieved, than anything else. He still lingered down her spine while other digits reached under her chin, tilting her heavy head up so his forehelm was pressed against hers.

"To think I was expecting demons in these optics..." His digits framed her face, trailed off it like he was admiring art. 

"What do you see in them now?" she asked, watching something swell in his red irises, the same adoring glint that had housed itself in his spark.

"...Beauty that I took far too long to notice." He smudged a kiss between her optics, tucking her helm under his chin and cocooning her with his servos. As if he was worried someone would snatch her away from him if he let her go. Likewise, Elita didn't want to leave. Of all the places to find complete sanctuary, it was a gladiator pit where she happily made her berth.

"You are a lovely dancer, by the way," Soundwave whispered after a long and perfect silence, blending so well into it that it was some moments before she realised he'd spoken.

"What kind of dancing are you referring to?" A lazy smirk broke on her face, half hidden by his neck. But he didn't answer, not even with an amused huff. When Elita pulled herself away from the warmth of his protoform, lying on top of his tense muscles, she saw his gaze thrown off somewhere distant.

"Soundwave?"

He didn't look to her, but his digits drifted around her bare waist. It was only when he blinked between endless nanoklicks, heaving out the dust of lonely centuries, that he spoke again. 

"...Kasimus."

When he looked at her it was with a wavering and vulnerable glow, every wall he had now crumbled away. "You once asked what my sire named me, before I started fighting. Now you know... Ancient Kaonic for 'angel'." 

There was another stretch of silence as Elita overcame shock, understanding just how much Soundwave must have trusted her. His name was the one thing he had that was purely his own, a mystery now only one other bot on the whole planet shared with him. And of course it was something as beautiful as that. Anything else wouldn't have suited him. 

She pulled herself closer to him, dipping her helm against his again to feel the bottomless thrum of his processor somewhere behind the marked metal. Her own was struggling to keep up with her spark as she plucked out a name she never thought she'd need to use again. 

"Ariel," she told him, letting him feel her lips move over his scars. 

"Ariel..." He breathed it against her like a quiet song, closing his optics over and tasting the name on her mouth. His growls had been heavy with Elita before, snapping at the moaning static in the air, but just that whisper of awe along her lips did more than any tailored kiss or trained interface in the galaxy. 

Though it helped that he did also kiss her, no longer having to hold back as he cradled her helm and smothered her in devotion. Though a crushing strength rippled through his frame, he only tenderly pulled her into his lap as he sat up, laying her down on the other side of the berth so he was pinning her down, only releasing her mouth when he slipped his down to her neck. 

"How much time do we have left?" she gasped, shivering as his lips trailed down her cleavage in tiny, needy kisses.

"Not long enough," he mumbled around her skin, tugging her legs apart with the hands caressing her thighs. "But... just enough for one more dance." He seemed to wink up at her, a flash of devilish red that almost had her overloading already. She let her helm tip back, all strength and will bleeding away under Soundwave's... under Kasimus' glossa... 

Or more likely, because of the sudden huge weight that plopped itself on her chest and almost crushed her spark chamber.

"Ravage, off the berth!" He tried to swat the cirkitten away, but the tail smacking gently in his face somewhat hampered his efforts. Ravage just yawned in the face of Elita's spluttering laughter, forcing his master to pluck him up and throw him off the side with an indignified yowl. 

"Now... where were we, Ariel?" Kasimus asked as he returned to her thighs, a rolling purr that was like Ravage never left.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little shorter than I'd like it to be, but I think I've said all there is to be said. I didn't want to ramble on just to fit a word count.


	23. Chapter 23

Tearing herself away from Soundwave's, Kasimus' embrace, the blanketing thrum of his spark and those rough purrs from his vocaliser, and bolting her cold armour back over her prickling protoform was almost impossible for Elita to do. But she had to, just for now. Just until sunrise, when she could waste a whole day gratefully in his berth. 

"You'll be back?" he asked, as if her answer would be anything other than yes. She cradled his helm, pressing it against hers and barely holding back from kissing him.   
"Of course I will. Keep yourself safe until then, okay?"

He leaned into her forehelm, a small nod as he wreathed his spider-digits around her own. "I will... for you." He grazed his lips across her hand, pressing the scars into them, hooded optics and sad smile daring her to spend the rest of the night with him. And she almost gave in, almost threw herself on him and tore her armour back off... but he let her go before she could. Her hand fell heavily to her side, optics burning red behind her lids, and she dragged herself to the door. Ravage watched her like a guardian from a perch to one side, staring just as intently at her as Kasimus was until the door hissed behind her.

After the soft gloom of his room, the sconces in the corridor almost blinded Elita. That was only half the reason she had to stumble into the open air, which hung heavy but cool in a shroud around her. At least the rain had stopped.

If anyone else was with her on the shuttle back to Praxus, they might have found her hooded grin strange. She couldn't stop feeling Kasimus' warmth in her spark, feeling her frame vibrate with lingering pleasure and the relief of finally having someone else to love after so long, and maybe something else she couldn't quite remember with her mind full of nothing but him. His voice was a trembling fixture in her processor, slipping out of her vocaliser as she hummed in a lilt of bliss. It would have been a fine lullaby, the low music playing between their waltzing bodies, one that would have happily haunted her all the way to her berth-

Though she didn't get that far.

"Peekaboo." Somehow Ratbat managed to surprise her more than any other mech would have, lurking at the back entrance surrounded by the muddy orange light of a street lamp overhead that blended into his frizzled fur. He wasn't well hidden, but Elita still wouldn't have seen him if he hadn't announced himself with a sharp wave.

"...So you _are_ following me, Senator." 

Whether or not he noticed her strained calmness, he only shrugged. "I was simply awaiting your return, dear. Never thought Soundwave would be such _engaging_ company for you..." He must have known what her face looked like then, stretched taut with shock and edged with anger, from how he kept his optics down at his claws casually fanned out. And she knew there was no use in denying it, if she even wanted to. 

"How... how do you know I-?"

Ratbat scoffed before she could finish the question, dragging a fang over his lips as he slowly brought himself closer. "Please, Elita, the smell is all over you. Even non-organics would tell something has changed." He gestured over her body as it shook for a much different reason now, almost making her feel compelled to cover herself. But that hint of anger, the sense of being violated, kept her servos and their tight fists bolted to her sides. 

"Well, I don't see what business it is of yours who I interface with," Elita said, clenched denta clipping each word into an accusation that barely dented Ratbat's confidence. 

"It wouldn't be... if you didn't just give your virginity to a murderer."

Whatever he meant by that, it only made her angrier. "A gladiator is no different from a soldier. They both kill to stay alive."

"Is that what he's filled your pretty head with?" He was close enough to touch her now, tried to with a claw hovering under her chin before she slapped it aside. The thought of his hands on her again, anywhere that would rub away where Kasimus' touch still glowed, made it a reflex action, one that earned her a hard glare from the Senator. He slowly let his hand drop, rubbing at where she'd pushed it away as if it was stinging. 

"You shouldn't trust a mech who lies about as much as his own name, Elita," he warned, almost threatened as he scored his claws against each other and created distance between them. Was that to make her more comfortable or to hold himself back? The uncertainty of the answer made Elita gulp as she asked through her tightening throat;

"You think you know him better than I do?" 

Ratbat still glared at her, but now there was a sharp glint of smugness coiled in his optics like a serpent. "I know who his carrier is. I know Liege Maximo would be very disappointed in him if he was still alive. And what do you know, Elita? That you enjoy his spike?"

"I know that he loves me. And that's good enough." She would have happily left it at that, already turning to leave him in the misty cold, but a spluttered cackle stopped her. Ratbat was supremely amused, actually having to wipe coolant from his optics while his fangs scraped together in their own little venomous dance. 

"You think that you're the only escort who's become smitten with him?" he asked after the wheezing faded. "That someone who bathes in death day after day knows what love is? And here I thought you were supposed to be smart..." From somewhere in the dark he'd slid memory drives between his claws, one between each of them with his thumb holding them together. He fanned them out towards her, like he was showing her his winning deck in a game of Praxus Hold 'Em.

"...What are those?" She soon wished she hadn't asked when his smile started shining in the street light, and his cape of wings billowed in the shadows behind him. 

"Just a few of many video logs taken from Soundwave's quarters," he answered. "You probably weren't aware but his, like all gladiator's rooms, are rigged with cameras. Endless coverage, just in case any of them have questionable hobbies..." He waited and watched as she took one of them in a nervous hand, dropping the rest one by one into her palm. "Like I said, you really should be more careful with who you trust."

Elita stared at her open palm, at the data sticks barely longer than one of her digits, knowing that similar ones had surely ruined many a blackmailed life before. She had a screen in her room, could have seen in less than a klick what was on them, if Ratbat was telling her the truth.

But there'd be no point. Pursing her lips, she turned her hand over and let the evidence clatter to the ground before crushing them under her ped.

"I don't care about them," she told Ratbat as he scowled at the glittering fragments at his peds. "Whoever he's been with in the past, however many, doesn't matter. There's a difference between love and interface, one that you obviously can't see!" She forced herself to return his glare, shattering through the charming mech she'd always known to see the beast lurking underneath all the polished facade. And what a hideous beast he was, almost slicing his lip open as he chewed on it. His claws were behind his back, folded as they liked to be, but still as lethal as if he had them held around Elita's neck.

"Hm. I was hoping that would help you see reason... such a shame." He huffed, shrugged his heavy wings like a sparkling leaving behind destruction as he turned to leave. But he couldn't leave, not until Elita knew why he sounded so genuinely upset by the outcome. He didn't speak with the tone of a mech who knew he'd lost, it was one of a mech who had to waste something valuable to win.

"What do you mean?" Once again, it was something she regretted asking as soon as he turned back around, still trapped in the flickering cone of light. 

"Well, Elita, you know how dangerous a gladiator pit is," he told her, not hiding the twitch of his mouth as it tried to hide a grin. "Accidents can happen... sometimes on purpose."

Elita hated that she realised what he meant so quickly, that she couldn't have just a few more nanoklicks of happiness. "You... you can't get a gladiator killed," she whispered, shaking her helm as if that would make it true. The display of denial only amused Ratbat further, dark wings fluttering with it.

"Of course I can. After all, Soundwave's sire was a very formidable fighter... _he_ wouldn't have died unless I made sure of it." Shock, dread, immeasurable sadness immobilised her so that she could do nothing as Ratbat took hold of her chin and forced her faceplate close to his even as her optics started to flood. 

"This is your last warning, dear. Any further contact with Soundwave, with _any_ gladiator, will force my hand. And I'm sure you'd rather have him simply sparkbroken than dead." His claws pinched her chin, so close to slicing through it. Elita was almost tempted to let him carve through her neck cables and just let out the grief consuming her in a gush of energon. 

"Why... why are you doing this?" She sounded as broken as she felt, so much that even a monster like Ratbat knew not to make it worse. He released her helm, let it hang limp as he answered softly.

"Because otherwise, you're just going to get yourself killed. Or worse. The world needs beauty like yours... and I'd appreciate it much more than him."

"You're nothing like Soundwave. You're not even _half_ the mech he is," she said numbly on a tide of sobs, not even able to snarl it at him. But for all the insult affected him, she could have spat acid in his face and it wouldn't have hurt him.

"And yet he's doomed to rust in a pit, while I spend my days in a snug little council chamber. Funny how the world works, isn't it?" He was smiling again with that satisfied huff of air from his vents that Elita wanted to strangle out. But she couldn't even get her own vents working, not while he was still standing there as if daring her to defy fate and strike him down. 

But that would have only ensured Kasimus' demise. She couldn't. All she did was weld her digits together in fists and stream coolant to the ground, with Ratbat's departing words dull in her audios. 

"Don't look so sour, dear, you'll give that lovely faceplate creases."

Even when he was gone, she couldn't move. The universe had turned upside down and was crushing down on her shoulders. She only forced herself inside when she could no longer kid herself that it was just a bad dream. Her only solace was the empty corridors she rushed through, and that her keening only started behind the closed door of her room. So loud behind the hand clamped desperately over her mouth, so devastating, the wavering soundwaves could have easily reached Kaon to their namesake. 

After who knows how long spent weeping and cursing and hating herself, Chromia knocked at the door against Elita's back, the rough thumps almost like the sadness attacking her body. "Uh... Elita? You in there, sweetie?"

Elita swallowed as much of the tears as she could, making her voice thick and pathetic. "Go away, Chromia. I'm... I don't want to talk to anyone right now."

"...Okay. I just wanted to say, happy sparkday. You left so quickly this morning I didn't get a chance to... Hope you feel better soon." 

On top of everything else, another jolt of shock was barely a spark in Elita's sorrow-numb nodes. It was her sparkday and she hadn't even realised it. Kasimus had given her the greatest gift she could ask for, and Ratbat tore it right from her spark. She had to bury her face again else she'd have brought the building down shrieking. 

Her room was dark through the gaps of her hands, coolant glittering in the mild gloom, but also something else lying on her table. A remnant from more naive days, Ratbat's first fake gift to her. She reached out to pick it up by its stalk, scratching the glass with her shaking digits. But that only made it easier to smash the rose against the floor, a shower of shards surrounding her and reflecting every angle of her curled up, utterly defeated self.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We all knew this was coming... but if you didn't, I'm so sorry.


	24. Chapter 24

The crust of dried coolant around Elita's optics and the coating of glass shards around her numb body told her it wasn't just a nightmare. So she wasn't surprised by the news next morning, when she managed to pick herself up from the hard floor she'd fallen asleep on and carry herself numbly into Beta's office.

"You really must have impressed Ratbat for him to be offering something like this... I'm a little jealous." Beta dropped the datapad on her desk again, the one with the 'generous' Senator's bargain for Elita to be his consort. It wouldn't just be one evening, like most mechs could only afford. It would be every single day from now on, herself reduced to a permanent decoration hanging off the Senator's servo and taking up space in his berth. Most femmes would have dreamed of being a consort, all their expenses paid for with barely a blink of the optic while their mech lavishes them with gifts and whatever kind of love could be bought instead of earned. But most femmes didn't know they'd be sleeping with a monster, missing the warmth of the only mech they'd want to be with. 

Ratbat had said any attempts to contact Soundwave again would mean his death... would he take rejection of him as an excuse to go ahead with taking out his competition? Why would he go to such lengths just to drive her into a corner like this and shatter her spark in two? 

Those weren't the kind of questions she could ask out loud, though. She swallowed her betrayal, her hatred just for now while Beta was waiting for a response. 

"If I accept... I won't be dancing anymore?"

Beta blinked, then scoffed either at Elita's sad optics or the obviousness of the question. "Honey, if you play your cards right you won't need to lift a servo for the rest of your life." She said it like she was supposed to be grateful to Ratbat for ruining her life. But of course Beta didn't know the truth behind the Senator's gesture. It wouldn't have made any difference if she did know. 

"...Can I think about it?" Elita asked. Time was all she could ask for at this point, but even that request seemed to baffle Beta. 

"Don't know what there is to think about, but alright. You've got until the evening to decide, that's when dear Senator will be coming to get you." Beta hid her emotions much more effectively than her; outside she was the usual compose and cynical femme, but only Primus knew how eager she must have been to get her cut from Elita's services. By contrast, Elita felt like she'd start crying as soon as Beta turned away. 

If she hadn't been with Kasimus yestercycle, would Ratbat have still made this offer? Did he make his threat _because_ she'd have no choice but to accept? The amount of possibilities, the implications only now crashing down on her grief-cracked spark almost made her collapse as she walked out. She might have forced Ratbat's hand by loving Kasimus, might have put the gladiator right in danger. It only told her that he was right all along... escorts really were as stupid as everyone said they were. She wanted to see Kasimus again so badly, if only to punch him for taking so long with her. Instead she settled for slowing near the door to her quarters and punching the bare wall like Chromia often did. But unlike with Chromia, the pain from her broken fingers only made her feel worse.

"Ow..." At least she had an excuse for sinking to the floor with tears soaking her faceplate, cradling her crumpled digits to her aching spark. No one would have seen her there anyway, not when they were busy elsewhere with no worries of blackmail or love made impossible. No one except Chromia, who must have been hovering near her door to find her so quickly.

"Elita? What's wrong?" The blue femme knelt opposite her, her whisper more gentle than it had any right to sound. The concern only made Elita's sobs thicker as she flexed her cracked fingers, letting Chromia hold and firmly spread them out so the struts would set properly.

"Kas... Soundwave. I... I can't-" 

Chromia's grip on her throbbing hand tensed, and her helm snapped up. "Did he hurt you? I swear to Primus, if he lay one fragging digit-!"

"No, Mia, no, it... it wasn't him... it's Ratbat." Somehow Elita made herself explain it to her, through the slog of sorrow and resentment. Only stuttered words that Chromia somehow managed to piece together, and which left her speechless for the first time in all that which Elita had known her for.

"What would you do... if you couldn't see Ironhide anymore?" she asked, muffling her mouth with her intact hand. Chromia still held the other one, but limply and with only a fraction of her usual strength.

"... I'd carve out the spark of anyone who stood between me and him," she answered, the exact promise Elita had been expecting. And the one she wished she could make where Ratbat was concerned. But as it was, she struggled to even stand up on her own. Chromia let her lean against her, shouldering her up with her back to the wall and the tiny dent she left in it. 

"Lita, you don't have to go," she said, almost like she could change fate by pleading enough. But Elita had enough experience of that last night to know that it was useless.

"There's nothing I can do, Mia. If I want to keep Soundwave alive, I... I need to do this. It's not the end of the world, at least..." It was only the end of her world, the one she was only just starting to grow into. It wasn't just Soundwave she was losing, because of Ratbat she was unlikely to see anyone she knew ever again. Politicians liked to keep their valuables close... at all costs. If she ever had a hope of even glimpsing Orion one last time, it was crushed to dust by now. Knowing that made her embrace Chromia even tighter, whispering over her shoulder through a hard clump of fresh tears.

"...Thank you for being my friend." The blue femme wasn't much used to hugging, but she at least tried to return the gesture with her servos loosely tied around Elita, and her faceplate just as damp as hers.

"Are you crying, Mia?" Elita asked weakly. 

"Of course I'm fragging crying, you dumb slagger." Chromia tried to laugh, but all that came out was a low sob she must have learned from Elita. 

That was the closest thing to a farewell Elita was given before Ratbat flew in to snatch her away. She gave Beta the acceptance she'd been bidding on, tried to hold back from spitting in the Senator's smug face as he held the shuttle door open for her.

"Now what did I say about creasing your faceplate, Elita? It doesn't suit you." The flash of curved fangs he gave her suited him well enough, sharp and painful, coupled with the sound of his claws grating together in his lap. She didn't want them caressing her, inching their way across her armour seams, not when Kasimus' smooth digits were the one thing she'd want to preserve in her nerves. But she couldn't push them away in the gilded darkness of his chambers in Iacon, couldn't ignore his proud purrs rolling under her chin, like insects crawling all over her protoform. She couldn't even pretend it was Kasimus rutting over her instead... it would have been an insult to him. Even if she didn't know how vile Ratbat truly was, she wouldn't have envied any femme in his berth. The sheets were soft and the view of Iacon's towers outside was splendid, but that was all the good she could say. Swaddled in those soft sheets and her own sadness, she tried to lose herself in the sun-drenched skyline instead of shuddering at Ratbat's insistent touches. 

"I told you I would appreciate you much more..." His noxious whisper against her neck seemed to edge on a hiss as it whistled past his fangs. She almost wished he'd bite her, just to give her an excuse to return the favour.

But true to his despicable word, he was a gentlemech, insufferably generous to her. Anyone watching them would have seen her utterly spoiled, bolted into the finest armour sets from Polyhex's most skilled smiths while a shower of jewels across her body turned her into a walking optic blinder. Maybe he was hoping to buy her love, or just cover up how miserable she looked every day after every disappointing night. Not once did he say why he wanted her so badly, why he went to such lengths to try and appease her so fruitlessly. After a while, Elita didn't care. Did it matter now, or at all? Ratbat's whole life was manipulation and trickery. Destroying her spark might have just been practice for him, an experience to use on someone else. But losing her life along with Kasimus was worse than anything Ratbat himself could do to her. He'd glare, snarl claw into her servo when she didn't smile enough in public or play along with the happy relationship, but true punishment never came. After all, he wouldn't hurt her after all the effort he made to acquire her. 

In truth, Elita had come to realise that quickly. But it wasn't herself she was worried about, it was Kasimus. The promise of his survival was the only thing keeping her by Ratbat's side, and her compliance was the only thing keeping him alive. At first she saw it as a delicate balance but then, vorns or stellar cycles later or however much time Ratbat sucked away from her life, but then it became much clearer one night infested by moonlight and the Senator's snores by her side. It was a pointless cycle. For all she knew, Kasimus was already dead. 

The sadness had dried up by now. All that was left was anger, boiling over into fury in the taunting morning sunlight. She shunned every piece of metal he bought her, every tailor made armour set for the only one she felt comfortable in, the one she'd left her old life behind in. At some point the devil himself had risen while she bolted the dust-laden plates on, watching with genuine curiosity at her firm scowl as she snapped the clasps together.

"Elita? What is the meaning of this?" He somehow managed to make it sound like an innocent threat, mostly down to how his optics appraised her as she forced herself closer to him.

"I'm leaving, Senator," she told him, with no room for argument. She's practiced it enough times in her head to make it sound confident enough. "I don't need your money, I don't need your gifts, and I don't need you keeping me imprisoned here for the rest of my fragging life!" In her mind she imagined throwing something on the ground at that point, but in practice she settled for just stamping a ped against the rug. 

Ratbat only let his eyeridges betray emotion, letting them tilt into something of concern before his mouth twitched with a cruel amusement. "Imprisoned? My dear Elita, you were free to leave at any time. You just knew you wouldn't survive anywhere else." 

Even in her realm of anger, that casual revelation almost threw her out of it. He was lying to do just that... he must have been. She was never allowed outside without his supervision, never even given free roam of his tower. But even with that, there was only one truth she was interested in.

"...Is Soundwave still alive?" she asked, barely holding back a growl. 

Ratbat's optics glittered as he shrugged with tellingly limp wings. "He's not worth the effort of killing, my dear. But where _will_ you go, Elita? Dancers don't get anywhere without someone to escort them, and... well, I doubt Soundwave will still care about you after this lo-"

He had a habit of stalking closer to her as he spoke through a smirk, so used to it that he didn't expect her to slap him as soon as he got in range of her hand. The sound of metal on metal, her old injury ringing again between her fingers, lasted long after his shock had dissolved. He rubbed the dark patch on his cheek with claws sharper than ever as he slowly made his helm face her again.

"...Perhaps I was mistaken. He's certainly rubbed off on you..." he grunted, narrow optics like a pair of glowing shards in his curdled face. The claws cradling the mark on his cheek twitched, like he was considering responding in turn... but they only fell as he stepped to one side. Behind his back was the elevator, the only way out of the room other than flying out the window, waiting for her like a hopeful omen. 

"Good luck out there, Elita," he said grimly, so close to a snarl that he couldn't quite hide. "You'll need it more than your looks."

It was so much easier than she thought to just leave him behind. No one stopped her, not the hundred guards or even Primus himself. 

Banished to Iacon's streets with not a credit to her name, Elita never felt so free and frightened before. All she had was the armour on her body, her own spark... and a comm frequency that she'd refrained from using until now, just in case Ratbat went as far to monitor who she spoke to.

The line barely buzzed before Chromia answered. _"...Elita?"_ She still sounded the same, despite her hushed shock that so closely matched Elita's own.

"Hey, Mia," she breathed, trying to stop herself laughing into the sky. She'd been expecting either stunned silence on the other line or a cacophony of enraged yelling, and was grateful for the former. Chromia would be wanting an explanation as much as Elita wanted to give one, but they'd need to find each other again first. 

"Where are you?"

The simple question managed to stab through the hundreds that were forming in Chromia's processor, forcing her to halt them all so she could answer. _"...Still working in Praxus."_ She said it uncertainly, like she wasn't sure she was talking to who she thought she was. _"You know a club called The Circle?"_

Elita had, and she knew how difficult it was to get in. She idly patted her subspace pockets as she spoke. "Didn't know it was still in business..." And then stumbled upon a tiny bump in the dark space, pulling it out with a charge card Ratbat had gifted only for her to never use, until now. By the time she got down to Praxus in a first class shuttle, she'd have already charged thousands of credits to it at his expense. She got strange looks from her wide grin down at her chance for revenge, no matter how small. 

"Mind if I pay you a visit?" she asked, already making for the nearest station. 

Chromia had either recovered from her shock by now, or Elita's own joy was infectious over the line. _"If you don't, I'll drag you over here myself!"_

Whether or not Elita still looked the same after so long, she couldn't tell from the greeting Chromia gave hers. The blue femme, still as strong and tall as ever, was too eager to throw her servos around the thin frame of her old friend to make comment, stoking her long-dormant spark back to life.

"It's professional dancing," Chromia said as they sat across from each other at a table in the club. "No escorting on the side necessary. Mirage is an aft, but he pays well enough... and Ironhide watches me every night he can."

At least she got the happy ending she deserved. Elita nodded silently as she picked at the smooth metal of the table, not touching the glass of energon to her left, only partly because she'd already fueled on the shuttle. "How long was I with him for?" she asked.

"...Three stellar cycles," Chromia eventually answered, reaching across the space between them to take her friend's cold hand. "Are you okay, Lita?"

Only slightly. Elita made herself squeeze back, if only to make the unbearable concern in Chromia's gaze go away. "...I'm just glad to be out of there."

That was true enough that Chromia didn't ask further, as always turning to more practical matters. "Where you gonna go now?"

The same question Elita had been asking herself the entire shuttle journey over, one that plush seats and free energon couldn't make her ignore, and one that made her helm heavy enough to lay limp on the table with her hands cradling it. "I... I don't know. Ratbat's card will only last me so long until he realises where the credits are leaking out from... I don't want to go right back to escorting, but it's all I know." Ending up right back at square one would be exactly what Ratbat would want. And Soundwave, her Kasimus... would he even remember her after all this time? Would he understand why she couldn't see him? Would he even _believe_ her? 

A warm palm covered her limp hand, almost distracting her from her sorrows. "Well, you'll stay with me and Ironhide-" Chromia said it like it was a fact, even as Elita shook her helm.

"No, Mia, I can't make you-"

"You're not 'making' me do anything, Lita!" The blue femme tightened her grip on Elita's hand. "I don't care how long it's been, you're still my friend! And I'm not letting you stay out in the streets with creeps like Ratbat crawling around."

And Elita couldn't refuse any further with Chromia's optics so full of fire. "...Is Ironhide okay with it?"

"He will be," Chromia assured with a cocky smile, one that somehow made Elita feel better. "And we'll help you with anything you need, just say the word." 

Elita knew they would, but she doubted if they could possibly give her what she needed. She wanted the beauty of life that Kasimus had only just been showing her how to see, before Ratbat made it all rot away. More than someone familiar, more than just a kind smile and promises that were beneath Kasimus anyway. He was the proof that no matter how life grated at your spark, forced you into the gutters and spat at your peds, you could still be so strong and beautiful. She needed that assurance, if only to stop her going insane. 

Luckily Chromia sat musing while her friend frayed at her processor, swirling her energon with a thoughtful glint in her calmer optics. "Say... you still dance, right?"

"I... haven't danced for a long while," Elita confessed, now knowing it was three stellar cycles since she last weaved a song together in her frame. Not even Ratbat could coax more than a few stumbled steps out of her during the many events he dragged her to. 

Whether or not Chromia heard the strain in Elita's voice though, she just downed the last of her drink and pushed herself upright while taking Elita's servo in one of her own. "Nothing a little practice won't fix. Come on-"

Elita was already struggling to catch up as Chromia pulled her along the vacant club floor. "Where are you going?"

"Mirage's office," Chromia said, looking over her shoulder with that glint worryingly brighter. "He's hiring, and he knows I can knock his denta out if he doesn't give you a shot."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And anyone who's read up to chapter 7 of Promise roughly knows what happens next.  
> The last chapter will be an epilogue of sorts, probably quite short but with enough closure to end properly on.


	25. Chapter 25

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IMPORTANT: I have added a little more onto the end of the previous chapter, just to clear up some confusion about where it fits in to chapter 7 of Promise. They don't take place on the same day, rather it just shows how Elita came to be a star at the Circle.

In the end, it wasn't her rusty reluctant dancing that kept her tanks full for the next few vorns. It was her vocaliser. Mirage had watched with only minimal interest as she twirled along a tune with only half her spark in her movements, the other half forever lost now. 

Or so she thought... until she saw Orion in the crowd one hazy night while she was lilting away. Unassuming, unaware Orion sitting right there at the bar, right beside Ironhide as if they were old friends, listening to her sing with an adoration she hadn't known she'd been missing until now. It was only then, the lyrics clogging her throat, that she realised why Mirage liked her voice so much, enough to parade her at the front of the stage beside Chromia; if it was enough to entrance her Orion so completely, it must have been something special.

Meeting him again; remembering the pure glow of his spark and optics, his clumsy way with words, the quirks and habits he tried and failed to hide, made her forget about Ratbat, almost made her forget about Soundwave. Almost... but it was as if Orion sensed something had changed, knew there was something she was hiding from him. Why else would he ask her to go to the gladiator arenas with him, if only to make her face her guilt?

...Or maybe Ratbat had just destroyed her trust in bots. She wasn't sure which one she'd have rather had be true. 

"Can you see the arenas anywhere?" Orion stood doing what Elita was desperately trying to avoid, peering all around as he scoured the crowds for any hint of a door to go through.  
"The entrances are along the walls," she said, a little too quickly. "Or... so I've heard."

Whether her mumble aroused any suspicion, neither Orion or his friends noted it. They were just grateful to pinpoint somewhere the crowd was trickling into, the arena where Megatronus, still alive despite the predictions, would be battling. Elita struggled against the tide of bots, trying to stay on the edge where she could still escape and hope to... to catch a glimpse of Soundwave? Even a bill with his gladionym on it? She didn't even know what she wanted... that realisation made her stop dead like a rock jutting out of the sea of bots swelling past her. Orion had almost drowned with them before he noticed she wasn't by his side, glancing back to see her cradling her servos at the edge of the swarm. 

"Is everything alright?" He appeared at her side, speaking low despite the loud buzz of conversation around them. She knew she wouldn't be able to look at his optics for all the concern brimming there, so she kept her helm low as she made an excuse. 

"I just... want to find an oil room first, before we go in."

"Of course. I'll wait for you." She didn't need to look up to know he was smiling. Dammit, why did he have to still be so kind after all these cycles? It didn't feel right, to have such courtesy given freely to her when she hadn't earned it. With Soundwave even a smirk was an achievement, every insult veiling a praise that brought her one step closer to his spark. Could she even compare the two mechs, both of them as different as Primus and Unicron? 

Away from Orion and the noxious crowd she told herself to stop asking questions for once, and graciously they temporarily disappeared as she looked up over the colossal Driller sculpture dominating the intersection of the main hub. She'd never noticed the structure towering over the center of the arenas, almost hovering above her with translucent supports at four corners. The perfect vantage point for all pits, however many there were... and surely where Ratbat had watched his vile work unfold when he was still practicing it on gladiators. Elita continued on where she remembered the Senator heading when they departed for the second time, and eventually found the stairs not quite hidden by the shadows of the mosaic ceiling. Whatever she expected to find up there, it couldn't be worse than Ratbat himself. She climbed without heed to her numb peds or tightly coiled spark, far into the dancing shadows until they spat her out onto a barren threshold. And it truly was like she was hovering in the heavens, the floor beneath her like a mirror that reflected the leagues between her peds and the ground. She was more scared of that than the dark behind her, almost too much to even step forward... but if this was what Ratbat was able to endure, then she was better than them. She ignored her trembling frame as she crossed to the other side, a seamless window with the horizon of cold death and energon spilled below it. An office, a VIP suite, or just a place to watch how cruel Cybertron really was? All Elita cared about was whether she could see Soundwave somewhere below, a glint of that rust-spattered blue armour or the blinding flash of his visor, anything to show that he was still alive and fighting. She pressed her digits to the window, only then noting that it was actually open air she was leaning out on, so numb that she couldn't even feel the wind on her frame, couldn't feel anything except her spark hammering and, far too soon, the crackle of her audios as Orion brought her back to reality. 

_"Elita? Where are you? The fight's about to start."_

"...I'm on my way, Orion." She clicked off her comm before he could notice the weight of her voice, allowed her optics one last desperate sweep over the miles of energon-soaked pits, before finally admitting that Soundwave wasn't in any of them. But even knowing that, tearing herself away from the hope that he was waiting for her somewhere was another sparkbreak all over again.

Maybe that was what she deserved... she hadn't waited for him, after all. Like Ratbat said, he wouldn't want her to find him again anyway. Maybe that was what made her so angry with him, knowing he was right. She never got answers to those questions, to any that she asked herself as she descended the stairs, retreating to the only truth she knew now as he stood smiling exactly where he'd said he'd be, like he'd been waiting his whole life for her.

Fittingly, that was the exact feeling Kasimus had as he sat alone in his room, listening to the distant fading music but otherwise silent and unmoving. It was a ritual he'd taken up some three stellar cycles ago.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And over a year later, I finally have the prequel finished! Whether some have read this because of Promise or just out of curiosity, I hope it's been enjoyable for all to read, though I understand some parts wouldn't be liked by everyone. But also if there's anything you thought could have been handled differently or parts that could have been written better please let me know, so I can improve for any future stories :)  
> I know some details of this story might not match up with things said by Elita in the Promise flashbacks (such as Elita knowing about techno-organics by working in TO-frequented bars), but Optimus didn't know just how much of what Elita told him was the truth...


End file.
